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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/28555494">The Depth of Fear</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Viscariafields/pseuds/Viscariafields'>Viscariafields</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Puppy Love [8]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age II, Dragon Age: Inquisition</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alistair Left in the Fade (Dragon Age), Amnesia, Angst with a Happy Ending, EVERYONE GETS A DOG, Established Relationship, F/M, Fade Dreams, Family Drama, Grey Warden Alistair (Dragon Age), Grief/Mourning, Post-Dragon Age: Inquisition Quest - Here Lies the Abyss, Sex, Warden Bethany Hawke, alistair rescued from fade, discussions of parenthood</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-01-04</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-04-26</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-11 00:34:24</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Major Character Death</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>37</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>48,541</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/28555494</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Viscariafields/pseuds/Viscariafields</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>“Corypheus is my responsibility,” Hawke had said to the Inquisitor not five minutes ago. Ten minutes? Half an hour? Maker, she couldn’t be sure, except that she’d said it, and now, some number of minutes later, she knew she’d been entirely mistaken. </p><p>“I’ll take the Wardens to Weisshaupt,” she lied, “And report to them what happened here.” </p><p>Hawke wasn’t going to Weisshaupt, and these sorry excuses for Wardens didn’t need her to babysit them. They could fuck off on their own. She penned a note to Fenris and passed it off to Varric without a word. He grabbed her arm, and when that didn’t seem quite enough, he grabbed the other, yanking her into a hug. She accepted it, and she probably needed it, but what she really needed was for Varric to continue the hug for the entire length of her journey to the Free Marches, where Bethany was. </p><p>Where Bethany didn’t know.<br/>~<br/>The Inquisitor left Alistair in the Fade, and Hawke has to tell Bethany that her husband is dead. Bethany is certain she's wrong, however, and a rescue operation is mounted to recover Alistair.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Alistair/Bethany Hawke, Fenris/Female Hawke</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Puppy Love [8]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1715638</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>379</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>62</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Hawke</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>I have created a playlist for the first time ever! Find it here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFC9Q10sjkcPMbUxfQv2fVF5BoVJ_l6L-</p>
    </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>I've been trying to come up with a playlist for this fic, and sap that I am, the song for this chapter is Death Cab for Cutie's "Transatlanticism."</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“Corypheus is my responsibility,” Hawke had said to the Inquisitor not five minutes ago. Ten minutes? Half an hour? Maker, she couldn’t be sure, except that she’d said it, and now, some number of minutes later, she knew she’d been entirely mistaken.</p><p>“I’ll take the Wardens to Weisshaupt,” she lied, “And report to them what happened here.”</p><p>Hawke wasn’t going to Weisshaupt, and these sorry excuses for Wardens didn’t need her to babysit them. They could fuck off on their own. She penned a note to Fenris and passed it off to Varric without a word. He grabbed her arm, and when that didn’t seem quite enough, he grabbed the other, yanking her into a hug. She accepted it, and she probably needed it, but what she really needed was for Varric to continue the hug for the entire length of her journey to the Free Marches, where Bethany was.</p><p>Where Bethany didn’t know.</p><p>But Varric wasn’t going to come with her, and frankly, fitting them both on her stolen horse would have been a bit tricky and tiresome after a time, and anyhow once she reached Jader, Fenris was there to provide arms enough to hold her for the boat ride across the Waking Sea.</p><p>He was a sight for weary eyes. Dressed completely wrong for the weather, exposed knees and elbows, and Hawke wanted nothing more than to throw a heavy fur cloak over his shoulders and untie the red ribbon holding back his hair.</p><p>Instead she almost collapsed into his arms, her legs bending around a saddle no longer beneath her, and he caught her, easily.</p><p>He smelled of home. </p><p>She wasn’t certain how they made it inside the inn, only that she never stopped touching him.</p><p>“Food first or rest?” he asked.</p><p>“Rest.”</p><p>Fenris half dragged her up the stairs. The room was big enough only for a bed and a stand with a basin and water, and he didn’t complain when she dropped onto the mattress without disrobing, no doubt covering everything in travel dust. Instead she felt the mattress dip under his weight, then his fingers against her chest as he undid her buckles for her. She could have cried at his gentleness if she had the energy to do it. Maker, he was almost the one—had things gone just a little differently—had Alistair not been so <em>bloody </em>heroic—</p><p>She didn’t want to think about it.</p><p>He lifted her shoulders to pull her armor out from under her, tossing it to the side. His fingers then traveled to her leather riding breeches, stinking of horse and sweat, and she let him move her this way and that while peeling them off her body. Once again she felt the mattress dip under his weight as he settled in next to her. “You rode hard,” her murmured, “I did not expect you for another couple days.”</p><p>“I should apologize to the horse,” she replied, “She must be feeling it much worse than I am.” She pulled him flush to her chest, her nose against the back of his neck. When had he taken his shirt off? No matter, the feel of his skin under her hand, the smell of his hair, they could have been anywhere, cracked open sky or a city on fire, and he would have soothed her to sleep like this. Just breathing the same air as she was, she felt her sharp edges dulling like the sea glass Bethany used to collect on the coast.  </p><p>When she next opened her eyes, the room was dark. Fenris was on his back, and Hawke had draped herself across him. Well she <em>had </em>missed him. Ached for him, honestly. A voice of clarity at her side, the quiet comfort of the familiar, the beloved. She had so many mistaken ideas, but telling him it would be easier to help the Inquisition if she traveled alone was up there with her most absurd delusions.</p><p>Her stirring roused him despite her careful movements, but he simply chased her to nuzzle her hair. He had missed her, as well, it seemed.</p><p>He kissed her temple, then kissed it again. Morning breath be damned—or evening breath or <em>whenever </em>breath—she pressed her lips to his and found them hungry, wanting. Ready to make up for her months of absence. Even at their languid pace, slowly waking and stretching just to tangle their limbs together, it took little time for the rest of their clothing to be discarded.</p><p>Maker she had missed this—missed <em>him</em>. Too much. She felt frantic with it, like if she stopped touching him she’d wake up to find this was only a dream, she hadn’t reached him yet after all, perhaps never had. But the Fade could never produce so perfect a copy, the glow of his skin, the timbre of his voice or the soft and rhythmic sounds it made, his mouth on her neck and her hips rolling to meet his.</p><p>Her eyes wanted to close, to focus on the pleasure bent on overtaking her, but she forced them open. She wanted to see him, the curve of his neck as it met his shoulder, the muscles of his back under her hands. The ebb and flow of light as he neared his peak, curling around his skin, and then his eyes as he brought his mouth to hers again, his lips when they dropped open to pant in time with her. She only let her eyes close at the height of it all, head thrown back and fingers digging into the mattress.</p><p>When their bodies had both gone slack, she contented herself with staring at his face. He ran a finger over her brow, stuttering on the freshly made scar. She’d craftily covered it with her hair, and then a general lack of consciousness, but she knew he’d find it eventually.</p><p>“Do you have any new ones?” she asked, and he led her hand to a mark on his side, small enough that he was never in any real danger. She took a slow, deep breath. “This thing, where we went our separate ways for months?”</p><p>“Hm.”</p><p>“I didn’t care for it.”</p><p>Fenris shifted in her arms, pressing his forehead to hers. “Then I should tell you that I also did not care for it.”</p><p>“Perhaps we don’t do that in the future,” she suggested, “Perhaps we stick together. Always.”</p><p>“I find myself amenable to that.”</p><p>She laughed, as she was meant to. With that settled, she felt a looseness in her body that was missing before, an easing of her breath she didn’t know was needed. This was no temporary reprieve in a port city.</p><p>“You should know I am more than just amenable. I once said I would face the future with you, Hawke. I meant it. But perhaps it is time to make it more official.”</p><p>“Do you intend to pledge your service to me like a knight?” she asked, fluttering her lashes.  </p><p>He closed his eyes, shaking his head until his face was all covered in hair. She brushed away the long strands as he watched her with irritated fondness.</p><p>“Marriage, Hawke.”</p><p>“Oh.”</p><p>He pulled away, and a small whine left Hawke at the loss of him—an embarrassing and involuntary complaint at the first time she wasn’t touching him since she arrived in Jader. His feet on the floor, he shuffled through his pack before placing something small in her hand.</p><p>“I found this in Qarinus. An elf tradition, but… well.”</p><p>He shrugged, and she couldn’t argue with that. In her hand was a ring—a simple metal band with carvings her fingers couldn’t quite make out in the dark. Leaves probably. Elves liked leaves on their jewelry. She tested it on each finger—meant for slenderer hands than her own—and settled it on the pinky of her left, extending it toward him in case his eyes could appreciate it better than hers. For some reason, from the depths of her mind, the memory another woman’s ring came to mind. A discarded hand in a sack of bones, an emerald with flecks of blood on it. Hawke closed her fist and forced the memory from her mind. “What happens next?”</p><p>Happily, Fenris took his place beside her again, and the sudden pounding of her heart receded. “We go to a chantry.”</p><p>She grinned. “Same as humans then.”</p><p>“We could dance around a tree together, but I do not think that would be considered lawful in any country.”</p><p>“But it does sound fun.”</p><p>“Is that a yes, Hawke?”</p><p>“To dancing around a tree? Always.”</p><p>“To—”</p><p>“Yes.” She pressed a kiss to his nose. “To that, too.”</p><p>He held her face with both hands and kissed her deeply on the mouth. And, right on cue, her stomach ruined the moment with an overly dramatic rumble. Hawke sighed. “I should have accepted your offer of food when I had the chance.”</p><p>“I am certain you can still get some.” She raised an eyebrow at him. “It is only evening, Hawke. You slept through the day. Can’t you hear the noise from below?”</p><p>She couldn’t, but that hardly mattered. Only hot food mattered. She scrambled over him to her feet. “Where did you toss my smalls?” she demanded to his giggles.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>This fic is a little different in that there are TWO main relationships that are going to be explored, something I've never done before. </p><p>If you've read a lot of my work, this fic technically is an AU world state.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Bethany</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“I really stepped in it this time, Beth.”</p><p>“Ali?” The world had gone fuzzy around the edges, all green and mixed up, but Alistair’s voice was clear as anything, a knife through the mist, cutting Bethany a path. “Keep talking,” she urged him, hoping if she could hear him, then he could hear her, too, as she pushed her way forward. And it was <em>pushing, </em>like her entire body was trapped in mud. Maker, what had he done now?</p><p>He didn’t answer, but she heard the words again, fainter this time. <em>Stepped in it, Beth. Stepped in it. </em>She chased the echoes, and –<em>what am I </em>doing, <em>I’m a mage</em>—set the muck on fire and sent it spinning away from her.  </p><p>She was dreaming. This was the Fade, and she could shape it to be mildly more hospitable so long as she kept her thoughts unharried. When the smoke cleared, she found herself standing on an empty landscape, nowhere she had been before. Green, slimy rocks everywhere, crumbling towers in the distance, and in front of her, sitting on his knees with his back against a stone wall that attached to nothing, Alistair.</p><p>She couldn’t run on the slippery rocks, but he wasn’t going anywhere. He looked… odd. Wrong, somehow. Beyond the general wrongness of the Fade. She couldn’t quite place it, other than the obvious—he was bound by vines that were curling up his limbs. She had her knife at the ready when she reached him, but the vines slithered into sturdy ropes that cut her hands as she tried to work it through.</p><p>“Hold on, Ali,” she said, aiming fire where his restraints met the rock behind him. But of course, now they were chains. They did not respond to her fire, and neither did Alistair.</p><p>“What happened?” she asked him. She’d never seen him in a dream before, didn’t know what he spent his time dreaming of. Nothing good, apparently. He looked a mess. His armor was rent, half torn away at his side, and beneath that he was injured. Old blood crusted and dried. The wound festered—not even bound. Was this a reflection of his reality, or just here? Did she catch him in a nightmare? Her magic wasn’t helping. It licked at his skin, but just like the chains, it had no effect on him.</p><p>Bethany took deep breaths as she assessed the situation—attracting a demon right now was the last thing they needed, so she forced the air through her nose and out her mouth.  </p><p>“Really stepped in it,” Alistair mumbled again. He was delirious—a fever perhaps, or maybe a demon had messed with his head.</p><p>“Alistair, tell me what’s happened,” she demanded, the fear taking hold in her throat. She had almost thirty years of practice not succumbing to her own emotions in dreams, and right now she was relying on all of it to not start screaming.</p><p>Alistair didn’t respond to her. Maybe it wasn’t him. He was… too bright, too much. Like the Fade was folding around his form. Like he had gravity here. She could feel it in the way magic was flowing, pooling beneath his knees. The landscape was green, but his skin was reflecting reds and oranges from no source she could find. An illusion? Her own fears put on display by a particularly cruel spirit?</p><p>“Can you see me?” she asked, stepping in front of him. His eyes half-opened and focused somewhere distant, he made no sign of being aware of her at all. “Oh, Ali,” she murmured, “You need to wake up.”</p><p>She reached out to smooth his hair from his eyes, but her hands passed straight through him. Where the chains had been solid, she couldn’t touch him at all. Her hands began to shake, but her voice was steady. “This is a trick,” she said, “Just a dream. You aren’t real. You’re not him.”</p><p>But still she tried again, to touch him, any part of him. It was like she was nothing, her own hands fading into shadows until she struck a chain. She pulled back, rubbing her bruised finger just as Alistair blinked, his focus turning toward the chain. He might not have been able to see her, or maybe even the chain, but maybe he could feel it. She grabbed on, shaking it, rattling it, and he stared, brows furrowed. So he <em>could </em>perceive her with a little work.</p><p>“Alistair!” she shouted, jerking the chains with all her strength, <em>“Alistair.”</em></p><p>“That’s more like it,” he said softly to the air in front of him, “That’s more how I imagined it would be.”</p><p>Bethany woke to a large, empty space beside her. Her hair was soaked with sweat, as were her sheets. Her throat hurt, and she wondered just how many Wardens heard that little nightmare, her screaming for her husband in the night. Not that nightmares were uncommon around these parts.</p><p>“He’ll be home soon,” she whispered to the stone walls of their bedroom.</p><p>His last letter to her sat on her writing desk, the creases smoothed with how many times she had read it. He could not have chosen a more distant or miserable destination. Perhaps Weisshaupt. If she had known how long he’d be away, she would have gone with him.</p><p>After pacing until the air on her damp nightgown caused goosebumps to travel down her neck, she gave in to the one thing she most wanted to do. She opened the drawer that was filled with his shirts—shirts she had helped sew and mend over the years—and she buried her face in them. This trick would only work so many times, and already his scent was so faded that she had to search for it. But it was there, kept safe in their shared bureau in their bedroom, and after a moment she pulled out one of his shirts and took it with her back to bed.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. Hawke</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>yall need something to read tonight, right?</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Fenris had already secured passage to Ostwick, and they were at the docks before dawn. Hawke was used to such a schedule, hell, she’d practically ridden through the nights, too, to get to Jader faster, but Fenris cut a grumpy figure on the deck of the ship, the dawn turning his hair pink as the wind whipped it out of its tie.  </p><p>“I’ll braid it for you,” she offered, her own long braid holding under the buffeting. “Orlesian style will hold it tightest, or maybe you’d like pigtails.”</p><p>Fenris caught her hand as she reached for his hair, his brows furrowed. He skimmed a thumb over her knuckles. “You’re not wearing it.”  </p><p>His voice was gruff with the morning, but it was more a question than anything. “I am,” she assured him. She shifted her armor to show a hidden buckle where she’d managed to loop in his ring. Her ring. It was secure there, she was certain of it. She’d fiddled with it all morning.</p><p>“It’s a ring, Hawke, it goes on your finger.”</p><p>“I know.” She swallowed, and once again another ring came to mind. This one had a pearl set in gold, and the last time she saw it was when they put the lid on her mother’s urn.  She rolled her shoulders. “It just seems… the timing seems wrong. To get married or decide to get married as I’m traveling to tell my sister her husband is dead. I don’t want to make her feel worse. To gain something just as she’s lost something forever.”</p><p>Fenris nodded. “You have a point.” He turned to face the wind, more of his hair out of his loose ponytail than still in it, at dire risk of losing the ribbon and completely heedless of it. Hawke joined him, closing her eyes against the sun and spray. Fenris covered her hand with his. “When I purchased it, I had no reason to believe we would meet under such solemn circumstances.”</p><p>What had she been expecting when that whole Inquisition thing was over? Varric wrote her a letter, and she thought she’d kill Corypheus again, hopefully a bit more permanently this time, Fenris safe in the north where rifts were few and demons fewer, no deposits of red lyrium. Not like she could do anything about the great big gaping hole in the sky, but cleaning up her own mess would be something. And then… back to exile?</p><p>She simply hadn’t thought much about what would happen after. But he had. The ring she kept spinning against the metal prong that held it was proof enough. She’d long given up on trying to plan for a future.  She once thought she’d be a soldier, joined up and everything. That ended soon enough, along with her tenure in Ferelden.  A refugee, a mercenary, a Champion. A daughter. A sister. It all ended, whether or not she was ready for it.</p><p>She spun the ring round and round again. Most recently she’d been a fugitive, though that seemed to have been forgiven. Slaver-hunter for a bit there. Now she could add Fade-Walker to the list, though the order was wrong. She should have walked the Fade <em>before </em>unleashing a darkspawn magister on the world and poisoning the earth with red lyrium.</p><p>How could she think about the future when her own actions from years ago now threatened the entire world?</p><p>
  <em>If there is a future to be had, I will walk gladly into it at your side.</em>
</p><p>Hawke had always gotten stuck on the “if,” but Fenris had clearly moved on to the second clause.</p><p>Fenris broke her morbid reverie with an even more morbid question. “How did it happen?” he asked, “His death?”  </p><p>Spiders. Blood in her eyes and spiders everywhere. Aloud she said, “Heroically. He saved my life—all our lives.”</p><p>“Then I owe him a great debt and my gratitude.”</p><p>“It should never have happened,” she muttered, slamming her hand on the railing. If she’d been faster, or smarter, or—</p><p>“He devoted his life to protecting others. For a Grey Warden, it’s a good death.”</p><p>“And me?” she scoffed, “I devoted, what, only three years to protecting others in the end. And only Kirkwallers, really, during that time. Until I helped explode them, obviously. I left the city in shambles and set free a power that is attempting to destroy the world but only after unleashing a substance that is slowly poisoning it. And Alistair died for it.”</p><p>And Bethany would grieve for it.</p><p>She expected his argument, some false assurance that none of this was her fault, or she had done her best, as if that mattered when her best resulted in <em>this</em>, but Fenris silently moved to stand behind her, wrapping his arms around her waist, his chin resting on her shoulder.</p><p><em>He was a better person than me</em>, she wanted to say. Fenris would never accept it, but she knew it to be true. The world had lost a better person <em>because </em>he was better and he stood in front of her and sacrificed himself when that was her job. And now she had to tell her sister.</p><p>Was he wearing a token from Bethany? Some bit of jewelry, something enchanted or pretty meant to keep him safe? Lost now in the Fade with the rest of him—nothing to bring back but whatever he had left in his saddlebags before joining the fight. All that was left of a good man.</p><p>Her ring scraped and scraped against its buckle as she fiddled with it. Despite herself and her imagined arguments with him, she did feel better having Fenris wrapped around her like this. Her shoulders relaxed a little. She let her eyes fall closed. She’d raced across Orlais to get here, the same paths she’d traveled with Alistair days and then weeks prior, wearing down that poor horse. To reach Bethany faster, she told herself. To do her duty by her sister. But now that she was with Fenris, no control over the wind in the sails of this boat, she wished she could stop time. That they would find themselves in an endless lull, and she’d never have to disembark in the Marches and face that duty.</p><p>She turned around and buried her face in the crook of Fenris’s neck. Well. She had a few days respite before having the worst conversation of her life.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0004"><h2>4. Alistair</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Death was not what Alistair had imagined.</p><p>For one thing, he didn’t think he’d be so <em>tired. </em></p><p>He’d always figured it would be in the Roads. He’d hoped, and then hadn’t hoped, and then secretly hoped again that Bethany would be with him. That they’d do it together. He’d already vowed to himself that if she heard the Calling, he’d say he heard it, too, and they would descend together. Gruesome, that, but almost romantic if he squinted a little and didn’t think about the details.  </p><p>At least he got his wish of dying first. He’d never have to live without her. Watch her suffer. Feel absolute helplessness as her body was lost to illness, age, or injury. He was spared all that.</p><p>Except he hadn’t known that death would be <em>so </em>lonely.</p><p>And tiring.</p><p>He was so tired.</p><p>“Don’t do anything heroic,” Bethany had said to him when he left. “Well, nothing <em>too </em>heroic,” she amended, straightening his collar, “A small amount is to be expected from you.”</p><p>He felt, at times, he could hear her words echoing through the vast empty landscape that made up death. Whispers that came from nowhere and were always just too quiet to make out.</p><p>“Sorry, Beth. Guess I don’t follow orders as well as I used to,” he muttered.</p><p>Though he might have reconsidered the whole ‘sacrifice’ thing if he’d known there was no rest waiting for him on the other side. He kept walking, until he couldn’t. Tired. Everywhere looked sort of the same, except it all shifted under his eyes. For a moment, he was in the Brecillian Forest, but that couldn’t be right. There was <em>sound </em>there, and not just the talking trees. Birds and things. Wolves. Almost-wolves. No wolves here, but now it was the sands of the Approach, and that was a far better setting for death. Nothing but wind there and the occasional scream.</p><p>He leaned his back against a Tevinter tower that crumbled into a Warden outpost that crumbled into a ruined chantry wall. He had no memories of how the fight with the Nightmare ended. He supposed that was because he was killed. One moment hacking at legs, the next moment, poof, nothing, dead. And then here. Wherever here was. Certainly wasn’t the underbelly of Redcliffe Castle, no matter what the stones around him tried to convince him of.</p><p>When he was young, he’d hoped he’d find his mother on the other side. Waiting for him. But he should have known. He killed her, after all. He wasn’t about to open his arms up to the Nightmare with glad tidings on its eventual demise, should demons go to the same realm as people.</p><p>And by the looks of how empty this place was, they didn’t.</p><p>This certainly wasn’t the Maker’s bosom, unless the Maker was rockier than the chantry mothers had made him out to be. Alistair had spent the last seven years snuggling the best pair of bosoms in all of Thedas, so he felt himself the expert on these things. And he’d imagined the void more—well less, really. Less everything. Just… void. Nothing. Oblivion.</p><p>This wasn’t that.</p><p>“The Chantry lied, Beth,” he mumbled, “Can you believe it?”</p><p>He thought he’d closed his eyes—Maker, could dead people sleep? Because he would sure like to—but the world shifted around him again, light bleeding through. Wind and salt whipped his face, and he was on the storm coast, watching himself fight darkspawn in a brutal thunderstorm. He remembered this. It was the first time he met Bethany. Had gone to the coast specifically to pick her up from the Orlesians who didn’t want her. <em>A spare mage</em>, they had called her.</p><p>Now <em>this </em>was death. Reliving his best memories. He might not mind this part of death if he got to see Bethany again. And there she was, right on cue, slipping in her new boots that were three sizes too big for her, too stubborn and angry to tell anyone the mistake, falling to the ground on the moss-covered rocks.</p><p>Alistair watched himself grab her with both hands around a chainmail waist and yank her to standing. “On your feet, recruit.”</p><p>She swatted his arm away, not sparing a glance for him. That was gratitude there, whoever she was.</p><p>“You didn’t tell me your name for a month,” Alistair muttered to her back, “Didn’t say a word to anyone. Wore three pairs of socks and gained a reputation as the clumsiest Warden to ever join up.”</p><p>Without looking at him, she cast a barrier a moment before a hurlock’s arrow would have struck his mail. He never would have seen it in the dark and gotten his shield up in time.</p><p>“I don’t think I ever thanked you for that.”</p><p>Bethany cast a spell that sucked half their enemies straight out to sea, a terrifying feat for a woman who never smiled, and she heaved a fireball at the rest of them. She didn’t celebrate with the other Wardens at their victory. Burnt up, Alistair had thought. A lightning rod for every demon in the area, if she didn’t do the job herself with her own mana. Burnt up within the year. No wonder the Orlesians dumped her here.</p><p>Maker, he was so glad he had been wrong.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>I think this is just a short chapters kind of fic ^_^  But this one is one of my favorites.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0005"><h2>5. Hawke</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>It went about as well as Hawke expected.</p><p>Bethany tensed as soon as Hawke entered the tower where a young man said she worked. Her eyes darted to Fenris, then the door, which did not open again. Hawke found her own eyes shifting that way, an absurd hope for the briefest second that maybe Alistair <em>would </em>pop on by, save her from this. It would be just like him to show up at the last minute and save the day, but that was the crux of the problem, wasn’t it. Bethany lifted her chin as if she already knew what Hawke had come to say. There were no greetings uttered.</p><p>Hawke had practiced this moment in her head for days. Different combinations of words all twisting themselves up, round and round. It needed to be fast, to the point, and clear. No use drawing this out for a single moment.</p><p>“Alistair gave his life to save the Inquisitor.”</p><p><em>And me, </em>she didn’t say. <em>He died for me. </em></p><p>Fewer tears than she was expecting, at least at first. Bethany dropped the vial that was in her hand, and Hawke really should have predicted that ahead of time, glass shards spewing everywhere. They crunched under Bethany’s boots as she left the room, the door slamming shut.</p><p>“Should I go after her?” Hawke asked.</p><p>Fenris wouldn’t know. How would Fenris have the answer? He’d never had to tell Bethany that Alistair was dead before. But after a moment, he said, “Yes.”</p><p>So she did. She followed a trail of magic, singed stone and icicles forming on every surface, apologetic smiles to the faces popping into the hall to find what the ruckus was all about, and caught up with her sister outside. Bethany didn’t acknowledge her, so Hawke followed as she walked right out of the grounds of the keep and up the path toward the mountains. Well, if she planned to throw herself off of it, Hawke would be able to prevent that. Probably. Hard to prevent a force mage from doing what she wanted most of the time, but, Hawke thought as she slipped on a sudden patch of ice, her mana must have been somewhat depleted at this point.</p><p>Bethany stopped long before the summit of the mountain, chest heaving. They were nowhere in particular as far as Hawke could tell. Nothing of note at this particular patch of wilderness. The same tall trees, grey rocks, and scrubby brush as the rest of it. But she felt a peculiar prickling on her skin, her hair raising down her spine from what must have been a build-up of magic in the air. That she could perceive the shift at all was a bad sign given Hawke’s general lack of magical acumen, and for one stomach-turning moment she thought she was going to watch her little sister’s skin slither and mutate into that of an abomination. Instead Bethany screamed with enough force to level a mountain.</p><p>Literally.</p><p>The ground shook and the trees trembled, and Bethany obliterated an entire chunk out of the summit, sending the pieces plummeting down the other side.</p><p>Well. If Hawke could redesign landscapes, she probably would have. Handy, that. There were a couple times she wouldn’t have minded making Sundermount a bit shorter. Save time on walking up that path. Hightown could have been a few feet lower for that matter. Too many stairs, really.</p><p>Bethany collapsed, which was, frankly, a bit comforting, because no mage should have been able to stay standing with the amount of magic she had just expelled. It didn’t stop her from weakly trying to shove Hawke away as she picked her up to begin carrying her back to the keep. Kept struggling as Hawke hauled her down the mountain. Mostly she was just crying. Deep, jagged sobs and noises a person only made when she no longer cared what a single other person in the world thought of her.</p><p>Hawke fought back her own sniffles. Never could watch Bethany cry without her own tears pricking at the edges. Now they fell freely into her sister’s hair.</p><p>Maker, she had no idea how to help her through this.</p><p>Was there even a “through?” No amount of grieving ever brought anyone back, ever replaced what was lost. There was just the slow trudge onward, ever onward, until the grief settled softly around her feet, the whispers of it occasionally tangling in her toes and tripping her up.</p><p>Fenris was waiting at the bottom of the path, and Hawke passed Bethany to him to catch her breath. She seemed to struggle less in his arms, Hawke noted, though maybe she had just tired herself out. By the time they deposited her in her bed, she was fitfully but firmly asleep, as only a mage who blasted all her mana away in one spell could be.  </p><p>“I’m sorry, Bethany,” Hawke whispered, tucking her in, “I’m so sorry.”</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0006"><h2>6. Alistair</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Alistair’s memories slipped around him, blending into each other in incongruous ways—trees in the Deep Roads, Darrian and Zevran watching him in the kennels when he was a boy, darkspawn at the monastery. None of this was right, but when he caught a glance of Beth’s hair, her smile, the hem of her armor, he felt his whole body lean toward it, until he sank into the memory and let it unfold around him, bathed in the warm light of an old home.</p><p>There he was, sitting too straight and trying to organize his expression into something approximating friendly, and there she was, stealing glances at him while pretending to examine her supper.</p><p>“You’re Fereldan, aren’t you?” she asked about fifteen minutes into the silence that had been accruing between them. Alistair had been shocked enough she’d sat down at his table and scared away anyone else who might have joined him. Her speaking directly to him nearly frightened the voice right out of him. He still didn’t know her name.</p><p>“What gave me away?”</p><p>She shrugged. It was the most he’d ever heard her say, so he pushed on. “I’m from Redcliffe, mostly. And you? That accent sounds familiar.”</p><p>It was the wrong question. A cold front clouded her face as she answered, “Lothering.”</p><p>“Ah.” That seemed to be all he could muster to say about Lothering, other than, a little belatedly, “I’m sorry.”</p><p>“Why?” she sneered, stabbing at her dinner, “It’s not your fault Loghain threw the battle at Ostagar and left my home to rot. Or that two Wardens weren’t enough to save the entire South.”</p><p>Alistair flinched, though he couldn’t say why. It really <em>hadn’t </em>been their fault, as far as he could see. A bit late on the beacon, sure, but that didn’t matter when the rest of the army had already fled the field. And he had killed Loghain for that, among other things, so justice was served, he supposed. Not that justice brought anyone back who was lost. Somehow, watching her attack her meal with the sort of gusto he’d seen her apply to melting an ogre, he still felt a pang of guilt. “We could have been faster at finding the Archdemon I guess.”</p><p>She held a forkful of potatoes aloft while parsing his words, her expression softening into recognition.  “Maker, you’re <em>him</em>? <em>That </em>Alistair. The other Warden. With the Hero.”</p><p>Alistair nodded, poking at his beans. “That’s my preferred title, you know. That Alistair, the <em>Other </em>Warden. Snappy. Gets the point across.”</p><p>Bethany cursed under her breath. There was something discordant about such a pretty mouth spitting such filth, but he couldn’t say it bothered him. “Sorry,” she mumbled, getting up to leave. Alistair caught her wrist.</p><p>“Stay,” he urged gently, absorbing the blow of her stormy countenance, “You’re going to have to work a lot harder than that to hurt my feelings.” She hesitated, and Alistair felt himself so close to cracking the hard shell of this angry Fereldan nut. He sealed it with his most winning grin. “Promise.” She nodded, just slightly. “Besides,” Alistair said as she sat down again, “It’s much better than what I’ve been calling you in my head.”</p><p>He regretted it the minute it was out of his mouth. “Recruit?” she asked her mashed potatoes.</p><p>“Close. Recruit Stormcloud.”</p><p>She didn’t get up and walk away, so he considered this a win. And after she had won their second battle together by individually tossing each genlock off a cliff, armor clanking off cave walls before they plunged into a shadowy abyss, stormy expression still settled permanently on her face, the name had come to him and just stuck. Thunderous at turns, dark and beautiful always. It suited.</p><p>Clearly she didn’t agree, because she replied, “My name is Bethany, Bethany Hawke.”</p><p>That suited much better.</p><p>“Well it is a pleasure to make your acquaintance, Bethany Hawke of Ferelden. It’s a bit late, but welcome to the Grey Wardens.”</p><p>He held his hand out across the table, half-certain she was going to ignore it. But after a moment, she locked eyes with him, those pretty, pretty dark brown eyes, extended her hand, clasped his, and shocked him. He yelped as he drew away, though more out of surprise than pain.</p><p>“Storm clouds are filled with lightning,” she cautioned. If he were not mistaken, the corner of her mouth was almost curling up. </p><p>He rubbed his palm. “Was that a joke I just heard from you, recruit?”</p><p>She shrugged, but that curl was veering dangerously toward a smile.</p><p>“It wasn’t bad, but I bet we can do better.”</p><p>She rolled her eyes, the hint of a smile disappearing. Alistair, the <em>real </em>Alistair, had a sudden urge to reach for her. “Kiss her, man,” he grunted at his past when his arm wouldn’t respond. A jolt of pain from his side and up through to his shoulder caused the memory to falter, to ripple and crumble around him like mist. The pain disappeared as quickly as it flared, and it took Bethany with it.</p><p>“Fuck,” Alistair groaned. He tried to drag back the memory, forcing his tired mind to concentrate on it—on her. “I made it my goal to get you to laugh by the end of the week. A real laugh, with your belly and everything.” He shivered in the darkness, his own words echoing back to him from an empty landscape.</p><p>“I did, too,” he told the nothing that was everything now, “Only took four days.”</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0007"><h2>7. Bethany</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>It felt like forgetting how to breathe. Every so often Bethany took a great, gulping breath, and wondered how long it had been since the last one. If she ever knew how often she was supposed to inhale, how hard or how long the intake of breath was meant to be, she’d lost that knowledge. She sat on the floor in the corner of their room, occasionally gasping for air, and tried not to look at all the remnants of Alistair that infused every inch of this space.</p><p>She’d woken up in bed—<em>their ­</em>bed—curled up around his pillow, a spark in her palm and an ache in her heart. For a moment, she couldn’t remember what caused it. Then she’d scrambled to the floor and stayed there, the skin of her knees dimpling against the uneven stones.</p><p>He was… he was never coming back.</p><p>It didn’t seem like it could be possible. All the parts of their lives were still here, well-worn but still in use. His clothes, his armor, his knickknacks—little statuettes and Duncan’s shield and any pretty runestone that caught his fancy. A book half-read. A sock half-darned. The custom desk he had built to accommodate his height. And more than just things—his job—his rank, his duties, his goals. They weren’t finished yet. He wasn’t done with them, and they weren’t done with him.</p><p>His wife. </p><p>It all remained, pieces of a life converging together to build the whole, and the man in the center of it no longer existed. It all collapsed around an empty space, scattering until they were just things. Junk of no significance now that they were no longer loved.</p><p>What was the point?</p><p>Bethany hardly understood what she meant by the question, but it kept returning to her mind. What was the point of anything?</p><p>
  <em>In death, sacrifice. </em>
</p><p>He always took the words too literally. Took the vow too literally. Unlike her, he chose this life. Happily, he had said. But unlike her, he’d already done the one thing the Wardens were meant to do, and he could have just walked away. Lots of people walked away. They saw too much, endured too much, and left.</p><p>Especially if that someone was being hunted by the very organization he had devoted his life to.</p><p>She replayed it all uselessly in her mind. Lea wrote them regarding the lyrium, and Bethany began researching. Warden Clarel summoned all the Wardens to Orlais, and Alistair countermanded it, ordering their contingent to lay low while he investigated Ferelden. As their only mage, he wanted Bethany to stay, and she agreed, because he wouldn’t be away that long, because the sky had a hole in it and she didn’t want to be closer to it than she had to be, because there were foul whispers in her head and in the heads of all the other Wardens, and by Clarel’s vague missive, it was worse in the south. Because Alistair didn’t hear the whispers and he wasn’t worried.</p><p>“They need your clear head here, Beth. And I’ll deliver your research, meet up with Darrian, tell Clarel to stuff it, and get back.”</p><p>She’d believed him.</p><p>But Darrian and his entire contingent of Wardens had been missing when Alistair reached Ferelden. And telling Clarel’s scouts they could stick their blood magic where the sun didn’t shine resulted in a death warrant for Alistair. And then, instead of coming home, the Inquisition came for him, led by her own sister.</p><p>If Bethany had told him not to go, if Lea had only contacted someone else about the blasted lyrium, if he’d left sooner and found Darrian… if she’d gone with him. She could have gone with him.  She could have died with him. Like she was supposed to.</p><p>She leaned her head against the stone wall, a sudden breath when she remembered how, and rearranged the events over and over again. Alistair stayed in the Marches and didn’t die. Alistair came back to report Darrian had thumped sense into Clarel and didn’t die. Alistair got halfway to Ferelden, remembered he had forgotten his favorite pair of socks, returned to fetch them, and didn’t die. Alistair was still journeying home, despite what Lea said, and didn’t die.</p><p>She felt herself drifting off again, in a far away sort of way. For some reason everything hurt more when she closed her eyes, so she tried to keep them open, focused on the dust that had accumulated under his writing desk. There was thimble under there, too, which she had thought lost for months. She’d already purchased a replacement in town. She had been an entirely different person then, planning an entirely different life. New shirts, <em>always </em>new shirts for Alistair who tore his at the armpits faster than anyone else at the keep, and always the right one first somehow, no matter what they reinforced it with, new handkerchiefs, too, because it was time, and she’d brought brightly colored threads to embroider their initials on them, maybe some flowers, something to do in the long evenings they didn’t waste singing or playing cards or fixing armor.</p><p>Now she was a widow.</p><p>The thimble slipped in and out of focus, and sleep would have been nice, because at least it wouldn’t be <em>this, </em>but the journey there was through so much throbbing pain that she shoved it off and shoved it off until it could be denied no longer.</p><p>She heard his voice. Alistair. She couldn’t make out what he was saying, like she was submerged in water and he was calling to her from the shore. So she swam. She kicked with her legs, her arms stretched out to push aside the Fade in front of her, because that’s where she was, and when she broke through to the surface of her dream, she was snapped into place on a bench next to Alistair in the dining hall of Soldier’s Peak.</p><p>“Oh, this one,” Alistair mused, though his mouth did not move, and his voice seemed to emanate from everywhere, slow and rough, “This is a nice one, though I can’t say how much you remember it.”</p><p>Bethany dropped her head against his shoulder with a gentle thump.</p><p>“You’d had too much of Samuel’s homebrew,” the other Alistair said, “And I thought, steady, man, she might have picked anyone’s shoulder at this point. A fifty-fifty chance she keeled over to the other side and nuzzled Sigrun. No need to get excited that she laid her head here. But you turned to look at me and said—”</p><p>“Ali, I’m so lucky to have met you,” Bethany felt herself slurring.</p><p>“First time you called me that. And I would have been elated for a week if that is where you left it, but it turns out homebrew makes you a talker.”</p><p>His grin was smug as he beamed down at her, and she knew she was about to sound so stupid, but Bethany couldn’t stop herself from continuing, “You’re so brave, and kind, and funny. I never thought I’d laugh again when they dragged me to the surface.” And she could feel how her cheeks ached from smiling, the tightness of her abdominal muscles. “The Wardens always sounded so dour and Stroud was the worst. Now I think I would have gone with them happily if I knew you were here. Thrown myself at the darkspawn and begged them to bite me or whatever it was that ruined me.”</p><p>He was right. She didn’t remember saying this. It would have been mortifying if she hadn’t married him a year later. And she especially didn’t remember the next part. Alistair, his arm around her shoulder and his hand near her waist, lowered his voice. “I think it might be time for you to get to bed, recruit.”</p><p>She nuzzled his neck in an attempt to whisper in his ear, “Only if you come with me.”</p><p>His grasp on her tightened and released as his face flushed. “As if you could take the stairs in your state. Up you get.”</p><p>Bethany reluctantly got to her feet, wanting nothing more than to press her whole body into his chest.</p><p>“I felt like everyone was watching us as we stumbled out of there,” the real Alistair said, “Who knew my little Stormcloud was so forward?”</p><p>But Alistair was a gentleman, even swaying at her door. Bethany might have pouted the way he left her so easily, a firm thrust toward her bed and a low “goodnight,” but the call of sleep was so strong, and even if the one Alistair had left, she could still feel the other one with her, all around her, breathing with her as she drifted to sleep.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Ohhkay I think that's the end of daily updates 😅😅</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0008"><h2>8. Fenris</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Fenris had watched Hawke grieve before.</p><p>It had not been pretty.</p><p>With Bethany, she had pretended that nothing happened at all. She had been right in the end, but he learned from Varric she had no way of knowing that in those early days. Her sister more than half-dead and abandoned to an unknown fate in the Roads, and Hawke spent her time joking, flirting, and taking on the most dangerous jobs she could find despite not needing the money anymore.</p><p>He remembered yanking a Tal Vashoth’s spear out of her shoulder while Anders fussed, and Hawke grinned at him. “The things I’ll do for money,” she’d grunted, blood in her teeth. “Never met a coin I didn’t like.”</p><p>Never mind that she’d split her earnings among her companions and hadn’t taken any for herself. It was a ruse, a punishment for trading her sister for wealth. She haggled ruthlessly for each job, demanding higher prices, then tossed their fee to Varric to figure out.</p><p>He’d thought her mad. Her family had been on the brink of starvation before the Roads, and she could have settled into comfortable obscurity, but wealth did nothing to extinguish her brilliance. Like a wildfire try to burn itself out, she searched for a firebreak but found only more to consume. No matter which direction she turned, she thrived in spite of herself. Lit up the city in her aura. Mad, yes, but incredible. Magnetic. Each wild impulse leading to another success, or a failure so minor it could be forgotten with a night of bad ale and worse jokes.</p><p>And then her mother was murdered.</p><p>Fenris had wanted to be useful to her then. He’d wanted a lot of things. But a month earlier he had walked out on her in the middle of the night, pretending he didn’t hear it when she told him she loved him, and he could not fathom how his presence could give her comfort. How anything he did could help. No experience with love or grief or family, and he was too busy setting his own life on fire to know how to quench hers.</p><p>And she’d smiled at him, like nothing had happened at all between them, drank so much he got leg cramps dragging her up all the stairs to Hightown, and thrown herself in front of the Arishok’s blades.</p><p>So he felt readier this time for what was to come. The barbs against her own worth held more bite and less humor than before, no doubt due to the ever-growing guilt for remaining alive when so many had fallen. Less alcohol involved this time, other than the impromptu wake for Alistair the Wardens held the night they arrived. Fenris had abstained just enough not to end up in the pile of Wardens curled up by the hearth come morning and save Hawke from the same fate. After that, tea seemed to be her drink of choice, which suited him fine. She slept and ate regularly, too. Perhaps it was because she spent her time worrying about someone else that she was more capable of taking care of herself this time.</p><p>Not that her efforts at taking care of Bethany were particularly helpful. She had tried to cook one of her favorite meals, only to find that after ten years of not cooking anything at all, she was only able to produce crunchy, blackened rubbish. She made pot after pot of tea that Bethany declined to drink. She carried meals up the four flights of stairs to eat with her sister in perfect silence. If it was helping Bethany, there was no indication of it.</p><p>But Fenris didn’t delude himself—soon there would be an opportunity for some absurdly dangerous mission with a chance at self-sacrifice, and Hawke would be the logical person to accept it. They were surrounded by Wardens whose lives were dangerous by default, and especially so now. Their leader was dead, Bethany was no use to anyone, and somehow Hawke always landed in the middle of everything. It was only a matter of time. They’d ask her to hunt an archdemon or kill a god or lay siege to Orzammar by herself, and Hawke would accept because there was no one else and she was needed.</p><p>So he joined them in the training yards, learned their fighting styles, kept himself ready for whatever fool mission he’d find himself on. Hawke joined him occasionally, which was good, but mainly she drank her tea, wrote letters to Varric, and furrowed her brows at Bethany.</p><p>Bethany was more of a mystery to Fenris. Whereas Hawke had thrown herself into every fight she could find that first year in Kirkwall, coin or not, Bethany had hung behind, as like to stay home with their mother, despite matching her sister in ability. She was quieter in her expressions. Less impulsive. And yet it was from her he learned the direness of their situation in Kirkwall that first year as she and her mother used the scraps of clothing Hawke pulled off of their unlucky foes to mend clothing for pennies.</p><p>But less impulsive did not always translate to good decisions. A bad decision carefully and fastidiously made was worse than one chosen in the moment. Hawke was grieving, yes, but she was grieving a man she knew only as a travel companion, a comrade in arms for a short period of time, a younger brother gained and lost just as quickly. Bethany was grieving her husband, and if it were Fenris, he would have torn the world apart for that iniquity. The hole in the sky served as a sinister reminder that mages were quite capable of achieving literally that—and Bethany was more capable than most.</p><p>Not that she was currently in a state to do so. When she wasn’t crying, she was staring into space, and when she was not doing either, she was sleeping in a cot she’d dragged into her tower. After finding her sleeping on the bare mattress, shivering, Hawke had taken half the blankets and pillows off their own bed to cover her, and now Fenris found himself pressing his cold feet against Hawke’s calves every night. When he wondered aloud if perhaps Bethany had a blanket in her room she wasn’t using, Hawke, for the first time in her life, had balked at taking a dead man’s things.   </p><p>On a rainy afternoon, he found Bethany sitting on a stone bench, soaked to the bone and staring off into the distance, toward the mountain she had reshaped. She flinched when he threw his cloak around her shoulders.</p><p>“You will catch cold,” he told her.</p><p>She blinked at him like he was speaking Qunlat.</p><p>“It is raining,” he explained.</p><p>She tipped her head upwards, as if to determine this for herself. After a moment her eyes fell closed, rain pattering across her face, and he watched the droplets mingle with her fresh round of tears. As her shoulders shook, she kept her face aimed at the sky.</p><p>Bethany did not seem intent on moving any time soon, so Fenris sat with her, an arm around her back. If they both caught cold, so be it.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0009"><h2>9. Alistair</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“I spent days thinking about the best way to kiss you, Beth,” Alistair murmured as the landscape cracked and froze before him, hungry and empty and cold. “Put myself on watch duty so I had time to really <em>think</em> about it. Plan out something dashing. I had half a letter penned trying to see if I could find flowers in winter for you. And in the end, it was all impulse, wasn’t it?”</p><p>“What are you doing?”</p><p>Alistair snapped his mouth shut on hearing Bethany. “I’m… watching, aren’t I? I’m on watch. Watching… all of this.” He gestured at the snow, because that was all he could see. Snowy trees, snowy hills, snowy skies, and now snow in Bethany’s hair and lashes as she bit back a smile, all aglow in the magelight she levitated in one hand.</p><p>“Looked like you were having a snack,” she said, and Alistair might have laughed, caught red-handed and rosy-cheeked, but instead he was considering how kissing all the snowflakes from her brow would have been much more satisfying than the paltry few he caught with his tongue in the night air.</p><p>“And you look like a blizzard,” he retorted.</p><p>Her snowy eyebrow cocked itself high and puckish. “Then maybe I should just freeze this hot cider I was thoughtfully carrying for our dutiful watchman…”</p><p>“No!” The word came out too loud, startling Bethany’s eyes wide open. The magelight went out, plunging them both into blinking darkness. “I mean. You look. Blizzards are <em>pretty</em>. And thoughtful. Welcome, really.”</p><p>“And cold,” she added. </p><p>His eyes adjusted enough for him to take a step toward her. “Are you? Cold?” He took her mittened hand in both of his. A sort of useless gesture, except for the way she was looking at him, her gaze on his mouth, her lips slightly parted. Maker’s breath, but he had spent too much time thinking about those lips this past week, and here they were, prettier than he remembered.</p><p>“Yes,” she said, though Alistair had already forgotten the question. Her nose <em>was </em>cold against his, sweet thing that it was, but her lips were marvelously warm. Soft, too, and insistent after the initial shock. He kissed her slow and steady, heart hammering in his chest, and as she pressed closer to him, Alistair released her hand to hold her waist, her hair, to deepen their kiss against her small sighs. </p><p>“I would give anything to kiss you again, Beth,” the other Alistair whispered, his words catching on the eddies of snow swirling by their feet. </p><p>“Wait,” Bethany breathed, tearing herself away to carefully set the mug of cider on the ground. She brushed off the front of her armor, stood before him, tilted her head up and said, “Okay. Ready.”</p><p>She leaned in again, but Alistair hesitated. “I <em>am </em>meant to be on watch,” he said apologetically. But looking at her dark, disappointed eyes, Alistair rather thought the risk was worth it. “Though I suppose nobody could fault me for falling prey to a surprise snow storm…”</p><p>He watched himself kiss her silly, watched himself nuzzle his nose in her hair, whispering foolish things until she threw her head back with giggles. He could feel it, if he really thought about it, her hair between his fingers, the puffs of her breath on his neck, the feel of her lips. But then it slipped away, as the memory did, as unreachable as Bethany herself.</p><p>“Come back,” he beseeched the nothing that spread before him, the longing inside of him stretching him thin.</p>
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<a name="section0010"><h2>10. Hawke</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“How did it happen?”</p><p>It was the first time Bethany had spoken since Hawke arrived. Well, to Hawke, anyway. Hawke had been bringing her meals to the mage tower, preparing a table for the three of them to eat twice a day, though Fenris sometimes chose to eat with the Wardens. Everyone was on their own for breakfast, given that neither Fenris nor Bethany had ever been keen on greeting the sun. Hawke did deliver a pot of tea to the mage tower every morning, though she often ended up drinking it herself later in the day to Fenris’s disgust. There were worse things than cold, bitter, over-steeped tea.</p><p>Like watching her sister grieve her husband.</p><p>Bethany had been sleeping. A lot. Hawke could see the edges of her pillow still indented on Bethany’s face, her hair unbrushed, her eyes puffy. Normal, Fenris told her. It was normal to sleep when very, very sad. Also normal to lose weight or gain it, and Beth, on account of sleeping through most meals, had opted for the former. Hawke supposed she must have slept like that when her mother was murdered, because she didn’t remember much of that time. Certainly didn’t remember eating any meals, though she couldn’t imagine Varric would have let her starve herself. So she channeled her best Varric and cheerfully yet forcefully placed more food for her sister to pick at.  </p><p>Bethany glared at her, and Hawke tried to organize her thoughts around the task at hand and not future meals that might entice her sister to eat, fingers drumming on the table.</p><p>The funny thing about the events surrounding Alistair’s death was that Hawke had not relayed them to Fenris at all. The siege in the desert, the blood magic, a giant demon trying to cross over, yes, she’d told him that more or less. Less mostly. Falling into the Fade and fighting a giant spider who knew her deepest fears? Not so much.</p><p>He did tend to worry about these things.</p><p>She drank her lukewarm, bitter tea and very much wished he had chosen to take his noon meal with the Wardens today.</p><p>“The leader of the blood mages called an archdemon. When it threatened to kill us all on the tower, the Inquisitor… did <em>something</em> and six of us ended up in the Fade. Physically.”</p><p>She studiously avoided looking at Fenris, but that didn’t stop her from imagining the scowl darkening his face. Bethany, however, did not seem nearly as surprised as she should have been. Even for Hawke, walking around the Fade like a magister of legend was a bit much. She would have expected some sort of reaction<em>. </em></p><p>But Bethany continued to stare at her lentils, drawn and unmoved, so Hawke continued. “There was a demon called the Nightmare. He wanted to cross over and terrorize Thedas, I suppose. Horrible thing. Too many legs. And eyes.”</p><p>And words. <em>You will fail them, </em>he’d said, and how those words rattled around her head, like she hadn’t needed ears to hear them at all. <em>Fenris will die, knowing you failed, just as your mother did, and your brother did. Just as your sister will. And how you’ve failed her the most. </em></p><p>Maker, she hadn’t even <em>started </em>to fail Bethany when he’d said that. Such depths she’d reach in just half an hour or so after that statement. Was he prescient?</p><p>“And Alistair?” Bethany pressed.</p><p>Yes, the nightmare had been cruel to Alistair, too. Not worth repeating those words. Fenris’s spoon dropped to the table with a thump and Hawke snapped back to herself. “The Inquisitor found a rift to get back to the real world, but the Nightmare blocked our path. Alistair—” Hawke paused. She’d known, she’d <em>known </em>he’d try something stupid. Felt it coming a mile off, the unsubtle, heroic bastard, and she wasn’t about to let him sacrifice himself on her watch. Not when that was her job. But she’d been wounded in the fight, a blow to her head that was dripping blood into her eyes. “We couldn’t defeat the demon and we knew it. The plan was to run, but we needed time. I was going to distract the thing, hack off a few legs, slow it down so the Inquisitor could get everyone out of there but—” She had lurched in the wrong direction because she couldn’t see, someone had her by the arm, and—“Alistair shoved me out of the way into the Inquisitor and before I knew it he was… gone. And we were on the other side. Without him. And the Inquisitor slammed the door shut behind us.”</p><p>“You didn’t help him?” Bethany asked.</p><p>“There wasn’t time. He just…” <em>Tell Bethany, </em>was the last thing she heard before being shoved out of the Fade. Tell her what?  There was only one thing, really. “He said to tell you he loved you.”</p><p>Hawke had let it happen. Just like Carver, running in front of her, straight into danger, and Hawke let him die. Again.</p><p>“You left him there?” Bethany asked, swallowing tightly.</p><p>“Yes.” What else was there to say?</p><p>Bethany pushed herself away from the table and walked toward the door. “If there was time for him to relay a message to me, there was time for you to help,” she spat before sweeping out of the room.</p><p>Hawke pressed her eyes shut. That was probably it then. The fragile bond with her sister she’d spent years trying to repair, severed. She’d known—she’d <em>known</em> this would end them. Just hoped Bethany would never get around to asking about it, really. There was no amount of atoning—no number of meals or pots of tea carefully delivered—that would ever make up for what Hawke had lost her.</p><p>It was strange, but in the past week Hawke had learned more about Bethany than she had in the previous nine years. The Wardens were spilling over with tales of Alistair, but that meant they inevitably told her about Bethy, too. How Bethany once cast a tiny raincloud to sit just above his head, and every time he opened his mouth to speak, it thundered. Nobody knew why she had done it, but they all agreed it was well deserved. The following week the pantry was overflowing with her favorite jammy biscuits, a definite apology of sorts. How the pantry was <em>always </em>overflowing with sweets whenever they came back from the city. How Alistair had once fallen asleep at the dinner table, head on his hand, mouth slack, and they’d taken turns tossing peanuts into his mouth and snickering as he chewed them in his sleep, and Bethany’s only comment was, “at least he won’t wake up hungry.” How they both stayed up all night with recruits beset by nightmares, and more than one Warden had woken up in the morning safely nestled between them.</p><p>Bethany’s letters never contained these stories, these details of her life. She mentioned the monsters they fought, any notable loot discovered, every memorable dog she encountered. Perhaps that was what she thought Hawke wanted to hear. But this—this picture of a woman fondly painted by her comrades—this was what Hawke had been craving to know about her sister for years.</p><p>And now she’d ruined it.  </p><p>She poured herself more cold tea.</p><p>“Were you going to tell me?” Fenris asked.</p><p>And then there was this conversation. “So I walked in the Fade,” she replied lightly, “Wasn’t my favorite place. Left it as soon as I could and didn’t bring anything back with me or unleash a <em>third </em>world-ending catastrophe, so I thought I’d leave the whole debacle behind. Let Varric tell the story in some light that doesn’t cast me as… as…” Maker, she <em>never </em>ran out of words, but her tongue was tied up in knots now. What was she, really? A villain? A fool? Fenris was inscrutable as he stared at her.  </p><p>“Not that part.”</p><p>Which, then? Her mouth opened and shut like a fish out of water, but Maker, she didn’t really want to know what <em>else </em>she had done wrong. Walking in the Fade was bad enough, especially to Fenris, but he found something worse? She sat quietly, all words in the universe having abandoned her, until Fenris asked, “How close was I to receiving the same news as Bethany?” He reached out and touched the scar over her right eye. “How injured were you when they dragged you out? Or was it the injury that stopped you from throwing your life away?”</p><p>Too perceptive by half. He was always too perceptive by half. If only she’d fallen in love with someone worse at listening. Like Varric. Hard to listen closely when he was already rewriting the story in his head. No matter, she had no answer for Fenris, or at least, none he would like. And it had only been a matter of magic for her to remember how to walk straight and for her eyes to focus again.</p><p>Her name came out more sigh than word. “Hawke.”</p><p>She made it out. Dwelling over the alternative was pointless when she was here, with him. A new scar, sure, but with time it wouldn’t even be noticeable, especially once she grew her hair to cover it. That was what she wanted to say. Instead, the words that came tumbling out of her mouth were, “Corypheus was my fault.”</p><p>“He was the Wardens’ fault as much as he was yours. He’s a darkspawn, and <em>their </em>responsibility. They are the ones who locked him up so ineffectively and forgot why they had done so in the first place.”</p><p>Maker, all of that would have been nice to hear while she was crossing Orlais, fleeing the Inquisition and witnessing a land devastated by red lyrium and ravaged by demons. But it was the other thing he’d said that stuck in her throat, because he was wrong, because he <em>had </em>to be wrong if she was meant to keep living with it. “Saving Alistair would not have been throwing my life away.”</p><p>“Maybe not,” Fenris conceded, his eyes large and glassy. His voice was barely more than a whisper when he said, “But I could not have borne it.”</p><p>Had it gone the other way, he would have received a letter somewhere, on his own, telling him she perished. No one to bring him meals or tea or fuss over how much sleep he got. Just Fenris, alone, forever. And despite that horrible image in her head, no matter how it gutted her, a terrible voice told her that that was how it <em>should </em>have gone. If she’d been better.</p><p>Hawke swallowed, the guilt in her stomach gnawing at her, always gnawing at her. Hungry, and yet with an endless supply of fodder. <em>You will fail him</em>. An easy prophecy to make, really. No prescience required. There were just so many ways to fail a person.  She’d never evade them all.</p><p>But Fenris did not reproach her as she thought he might. Instead, he reached for her hand. Unexpected, given his general level of disappointment with her. Even more perplexing was when he tugged her over into his lap. Angry people didn’t usually give such good hugs, all strong arms and warm skin.</p><p>“Next time—” he sighed when she pressed her forehead against his—“don’t leave me behind.”</p><p>She knew he meant more than just physically. And how was she to know what the future held? But he needed to hear it, so she said it. “I promise.”</p>
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<a name="section0011"><h2>11. Bethany</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Content warnings for sexy times, grief, super dark thoughts, and improper use of potions.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“Warden-Acolyte Hawke.”</p><p>Bethany’s eyes snapped up to see Alistair’s clouded gaze.</p><p>“Meet me in my office. Dismissed.”</p><p>There were whispers and hums and a lot of eyebrows raised in her direction as the Wardens broke up for their assignments. Sigrun went to far as to elbow her and ask, “What did you do?”</p><p>Bethany tucked her hair behind one ear and shrugged. She had no idea. He’d sounded annoyed. Alistair rarely sounded annoyed. Not with her, anyway. And since relocating to the old keep outside of Ostwick, the only thing she’d been tasked with doing was clearing out the tower and making it suitable for mage purposes. As the only mage, she was the only person qualified to really decide whether she’d accomplished that. And Alistair had—well he’d been avoiding her. Appearances and chain of command and all that to go with his promotion. Despite requesting that she make the trip across the Waking Sea, the new commander couldn’t be caught snogging his mage in every hallway.</p><p>Like he had done in Soldier’s Peak.</p><p>Bethany dragged her feet on her way to her dressing down. Maybe he regretted bringing her. Maybe it had all been a mistake, but she couldn’t believe that. Wouldn’t believe it, until he said it.</p><p>Alistair was standing by the window, a knitted jumper stretched tight across his shoulders with his arms crossed like that. He turned to look at her and she swallowed.</p><p>“Close the door.”</p><p>She did as he asked, the latch sounding overly loud in her ears. On an impulse, she locked it. She didn’t want anyone walking in on this, whatever it was.</p><p>He had moved to lean against his desk, and Bethany’s eyes traveled slowly from his feet in their fur-lined slippers, up his legs to his woolen jumper and the broad expanse of his chest, and finally his grim face.</p><p>“Warden Commander?” she asked.</p><p>He huffed, a tiny little thing, as if he couldn’t believe she would call him that. What else was she meant to call him? “Are you trying to distract me every hour of the day?” Alistair demanded.</p><p>Bethany blinked in surprise. “What did I do?”</p><p>“Maker, Beth, you were…” He stared at her, incredulously, and it wasn’t anger, exactly, that he was exuding. Frustration, yes, but something else.  “You were staring at me. The whole time. And biting your lip. Trying to give orders and you looking at me like… like <em>that</em>.”</p><p>Bethany could hardly be faulted for watching her commander as he gave orders, but she realized with a flush she was, in fact, currently biting her lip and staring at his <em>mouth</em>. “Sorry,” she mumbled, trying to look at anything that wasn’t him. </p><p>It was difficult, as if her entire body was attuned to him. She <em>wanted </em>to look at him. A slight move of his hand, and her gaze was on it—on <em>him—</em> again.  It was a good hand, large, and capable, and… and instead of biting her lip, she was simply pressing them both together, which wasn’t much of an improvement. She chanced looking at his face to gauge his expression and found Alistair closer than she’d remembered him being a moment ago.</p><p>He didn’t look angry at all. Haunted, she thought. Hungry.</p><p>“Oh,” she breathed just before she kissed him. Those big, capable hands were on her at once, pulling her flush and tight against him, and after a moment Bethany found herself biting <em>his </em>lip. Alistair groaned into her mouth, the fool. He’d missed this as much as she had, and now she was going to make up for the time he lost.  There weren’t enough kisses for the weeks of useless pining, but she’d try.  </p><p>“Beth,” he breathed as she kissed his neck, her hands traveling beneath his shirt to grasp the muscles of his back. Inch by inch she uncovered the skin of his torso. She thought he might protest, that he might remember he had decided to stop kissing her, but he helpfully lifted his arms so she could pull his shirt and jumper off, finishing the job for her when she was too short to reach.</p><p>Maker, he was so beautiful. Golden and broad and warm. And when he pulled away, she realized he had the ties of her shirt undone and her brassiere unclasped. Alistair grinned as she rolled her shoulders, but the smirk fell away into something like reverence when she shucked it all. Then it was all mouths again. And hands, Maker, his hands on her breasts as she bumped up against his desk, his hips pressing against hers. Then one simple scoop and he was holding her up, her legs wrapped around his waist.</p><p>She could feel him through their breeches, hard and pressing on her in a way that made her breath catch in her throat. Her backside hit the top of the desk with a clatter of his things scattering about, but Alistair had his tongue on her neck and she found she couldn’t care about anything else but him and pulsing heat between her thighs.</p><p>But then he pulled away, and his hand met hers where she tugged at his laces, stilling them. “If we’re going to—” He paused, took a deep, panting breath into her neck, and tried again, meeting her eyes. “If we’re going to… make love, then we should do it right.”</p><p>His choice of words was not lost on her, but she had a rather more urgent concern. “But we are <em>going to</em>, aren’t we?” she replied breathlessly, her thighs flexing around his waist.  </p><p>He dropped his forehead to hers, a soft chuckle on his lips. “Yes—” he cleared his throat—“Yes we are. But not on my desk.” His fingers dug into the soft flesh of her bottom, and he hoisted her up again. “This time.”</p><p>He carried her to his adjoining bedroom, more a closet with a bed than anything, and it <em>was </em>making love, despite Bethany’s urgency. The way Alistair’s fingers trembled, and how his name fit in her mouth, his dedicated focus to her pleasure, the breaths she stole from him—that was all love. But even more so when clashed their teeth together and broke apart to laugh, or when Alistair got a mouth full of Bethany’s hair and looked like a confused cat trying to spit it out, or when, after they had both collapsed into each other, Bethany broke the sound of their panting with giggles that she just couldn’t stop, bubbling forth until Alistair was laughing, too, and neither of them quite knew why, except they did, truly.</p><p>And then they made love again in a thousand little ways and one rather large one that left Bethany feeling like she was floating. She could have done, if she wanted. Floated right away like the cloud he called her.</p><p>“More like a tornado,” Alistair told her, gesturing at their clothes tossed everywhere and the mess of his desk. She twisted in his arms and settled against his chest.</p><p>“If you tell me I have to sneak out,” she said with her eyes already closed, “I shall be very cross with you, Warden-Commander.”</p><p>“I think I’d be very cross with myself, Recruit,” he replied, “For giving such a bad order. You’re not very good at sneaking, you know.”  She might have shocked him, if she weren’t already half asleep, too tired and satisfied to bother opening her eyes. It pleased that point of foolishness was settled somewhere in their past.</p><p>“I stayed awake for another two hours or so, you know,” Alistair said, his fingers curling in her hair. His voice sounded wrong, rough and dry, cracked. Something was wrong about this, him speaking at all, but she couldn’t quite place it. Try as she might, she couldn’t open her eyes. “I was so scared,” he continued, “You seemed to have fallen from the sky into my life and I had never wanted anything so badly.”</p><p>The bristles of his beard tickled her forehead, followed by a kiss. <em>I came up from the earth, Ali, </em>she wanted to say.</p><p>“I loved you. I had never loved anything the way I loved you, and I didn’t know it until this night. I wrote Darrian the next day and begged him to demote me. He called me an idiot. Told me to marry you and have done with it.”</p><p>The dream started to fade away. She could still feel him under her fingers, but she felt the blanket on her cot, too, and how it had slipped in the night and her foot was exposed and cold. <em>No,</em> she thought desperately as the scene collapsed around her, Alistair still mumbling something, something she wanted to hear. <em>Come back, Ali, please, come back. </em>But her eyes opened, her real eyes, and he was gone.</p><p>She blinked at the stone walls of her mage tower. It had felt real. He had felt real. He was—he was right there. They were—</p><p>The tears came quickly.  </p><p>They had been happy.  </p><p>She pulled the covers over her head, knees pressed to her chest. All she wanted was to feel him again. That was it. There was nothing else in the world that held any interest or temptation. There was no point to it without him.</p><p>She saw her life stretching out before her, a big gaping nothing, no change, no improvement, no relief from her losses, and there was no point in dwelling in it. It was not a future she wanted, slow and lonely, brutal and violent and endless.</p><p>So she would sleep. She <em>had </em>been sleeping, but it wasn’t enough. Wakefulness found her with a devastating accuracy, and no matter how long she tossed and turned in her cot, she could not find her way back to him.</p><p>That was when Bethany began mixing sleeping potions.</p><p>The first were too strong, and she didn’t enter the Fade at all, just woke with bleary eyes and a pounding head. Too weak, and the potion only dulled the world beyond her ability to comprehend it but did not quite tip her over the edge into sleeping. The trick was in the timing, she learned. The potion didn’t need to last an entire night, especially when nights and days no longer mattered to her. She took the potion, slipped into the Fade for a few hours only, then woke and did it again.</p><p>If she could only see him in her dreams, Bethany had no plans of staying awake.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0012"><h2>12. Hawke</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“She’s sleeping too much,” she said to Fenris, once again sitting down to a lunch that Bethany refused by simply not leaving her cot. From the light snoring, she really was sleeping and not just ignoring Hawke, for what little gratification that was. Unless Bethan had decided she would prefer keeping up a snoring charade to spending time with her. It was possible. Hawke narrowed her eyes. She wouldn’t put it past her.</p><p>“Sleeping is a normal response to grief,” Fenris reminded her.  </p><p>“So you’ve said. And normal, yes, fine. But good? Healthy? She’s not eating anymore. She’s not moving. Her muscles will atrophy. What happens when the Wardens order her underground?”</p><p>“There’s no one left to order her to do anything, and I think her comrades know better than to do that.”</p><p>“Do they?” Hawke wondered aloud. From what she’d seen, judgment wasn’t high up on Warden talents. Nor was respect for their mages, for that matter. And it had been weeks now, and Bethany only seemed to be getting worse.</p><p>“Everyone knows that she will take time to recover. Until a new leader is posted here, the Wardens are content to winter quietly.”</p><p>Fenris was probably right. He was almost always right.</p><p>Didn’t mean she couldn’t try to prove him wrong, though. Hawke stood up and wandered over to the potions bench, picking up a vial and sniffing it.</p><p>“There is a small chantry in town,” he said.</p><p>“I suspect there is a small chantry in most towns,” she called over her shoulder. She did hear some bells the other day, come to think of it. She opened the drawers and examined the contents within. Elfroot, spindleweed, embrium. Hawke had spent enough time mixing poisons to know her way around the herbs. It was the depleted stock of deathroot that interested her, however. A bit of a misnomer, there. True, it was not the most salubrious plant in all of Thedas, but the death was in reference to where it preferred to grow—over graves—and not to its most common effect, which was sleep.</p><p>“I thought that we could go to this one.”</p><p>Bethany’s mortar and pestle were sitting out on the bench, herbs half-ground, and Hawke swirled her finger in the mess, picking out the stem of a deathroot.</p><p>Blast.</p><p>Hawke hummed noncommittally at whatever it was Fenris had said to her, making her way to the stairs the led to the loft where Bethany lay sleeping. Her eyelashes fluttered in some dream, and to her side, right where Hawke thought it would be, was an empty vial. More alarmingly, she had lined up three more. Hawke resisted kicking the leg of Bethany’s cot in favor of swiping the potions and climbing back down to rejoin Fenris. </p><p>“Hawke? The chantry?” he pressed.</p><p>“Oh, um, no. What? Why?” Hawke lined the potions up on the table and plopped herself across from him again. “I can’t say I’m in a chanting mood.”</p><p>His expression looked far more open and hurt than someone who had just been denied the ramblings of whatever priest got assigned to the middle of Marcher nowhere. Hawke shrank under it, wondering when she’d lost her footing in this conversation.</p><p>“It has been a month,” he said, “Since you said you would marry me.”</p><p>Oh. So it had. Now that she wasn’t wearing armor every day, she had moved the ring to a pocket where it pressed against her hip bone when she wasn’t spinning it around a fingertip. Logically she knew she couldn’t actually feel it through the thick breeches she wore, but she did somehow. Her hand found it now, round and metal and still very much a ring.</p><p>“Oh.”</p><p>“It would be simple to find a priest.”</p><p>“Now?”</p><p>Fenris shrugged. “Today, tomorrow. Next week.” He frowned at her stunned face.  “For the first time, neither of us is being hunted. We have no battles that are ours, and we don’t have to run. We once talked about putting down roots. We could start a life together.”</p><p>“Here?” she asked.</p><p>He threw his hands in the air. “Anywhere.”</p><p>Ah. That narrowed it down, didn’t it? Like Merrill, she could just sprout roots and send them in any direction, see where they stuck. Of course, Merrill’s roots tended to crumble after a minute or two, and Hawke knew the feeling. Even stone crumbled when Hawke was around.</p><p>She drummed her fingers on the table and stared at the bottles of not-quite-poison her sister had brewed up to drink herself into a permanent stupor. Hawke might have talked big three years ago when she was a Champion and had never seen the sky turn red or green with blood and magic, but she knew nothing about roots. “Nothing’s changed, Fenris. Bethany needs help, even if she doesn’t want it. This isn’t the time.”</p><p>“Do you really think she would even notice?”</p><p>Hawke bristled. It didn’t matter whether Bethany noticed. It was tasteless. It was inappropriate and wrong. All of this was wrong.</p><p>Since when did Fenris think about the future anyway? He had seemed almost relieved when they fled Kirkwall, completely comfortable on the road, practiced at hiding his face, teaching her how to hide hers against every instinct she had. And it had been simple, really. She knew how to stand behind him in a fight, or, well, more often behind the enemy, and in dire straits, back-to-back with Fenris, so after the initial shock of losing everything she’d accumulated over the years in Kirkwall save him, it was easy to run and hide and stay light on her feet. And now he wanted to—root her.</p><p>Three years of moving, and Hawke didn’t remember how to stop. And then there was Bethany, and Alistair, and the Nightmare still in the Fade somewhere on all of his many legs, peering into her heart through the hole in the sky. What future?</p><p>“My only plan for the future,” she said, “Is to get Bethany to eat something within the two days. Beyond that, I have no idea.”</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0013"><h2>13. Bethany</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Bethany shut the door behind her, gently plying the latch as quietly as possible before saying, “I have something for you.” Setting down the report he was working on, Alistair turned to her with such a smile that Bethany felt herself flush with embarrassment for no reason at all. “It’s a little silly,” she amended.</p><p>Alistair was undeterred. “I like silly.”</p><p>He did. She knew that about him. And yet, somehow, the little present she held behind her back felt overly stupid to give to him now. “I remembered you telling me a story about when you were a child you saw a noble man with bright blue handkerchiefs in Redcliffe, and how extravagant you thought it was, you know, that you had only ever seen white ones or brown, you hadn’t thought they could be other colors. Um, so when we were in Rialto, I saw these fabrics of all different shades and—”</p><p>He cut into her babbling. “You were listening to all that?”</p><p>She let her hands drop in front of her, the neatly folded handkerchiefs fully visible now. “I always listen to you. They had at least seven shades of blue,” she continued while he stood up to approach her, “But I got some other colors, too, pink and orange and—”</p><p>Alistair took her hands in his, handkerchiefs and all. “Marry me.”</p><p>Her mouth dropped clear open. “What?”</p><p>He grinned all lopsided and pressed her handkerchief-holding knuckles to his lips. “So she doesn’t <em>always </em>listen to what I say.”</p><p>“I heard what you said I just—”</p><p>“Marry me, Bethany Hawke.”</p><p>“Yes.”</p><p>That took his grin away and shocked him straight into gawping. She liked him gawping. “What?”</p><p>“Now who’s not listening?” she gloated, “Yes, I’ll marry you.”</p><p>They both broke into sort of breathless giggles, and, Maker, she was going to <em>marry </em>him, but first she was going to kiss him silly right on the mouth.</p><p>“We can do it today,” he said between kisses, “Go into town, find someone at the chantry.”</p><p>“Yes.”</p><p>“Really?”</p><p>“Maker, Alistair, do I have to drag you there myself?” To make her point, she began pulling him toward the door. Her hand started to slip, though, slip right through him, and his face started to change—no longer happy, but gaunt, stretched, filthy. Scared.</p><p>“Don’t go,” he groaned, or maybe Bethany had said it herself because she was losing him, and if only she could stay asleep a little bit longer they’d make it to the chantry and stay at the tavern in town just for fun, ordering their most expensive liquor and making faces when it was awful, giggling all the way to bed where Alistair declared himself Mr. Warden-Commander Hawke, and Bethany wanted to see it and hear it and feel it—feel <em>him—</em> and not the rough edges of her stupid cot in the miserable waking world.</p><p>Bethany reached for the potion stashed to the side of her bed, uncorked it, and downed the contents without even looking. Then she flopped back over, arm blocking the light across her face, and waited for sleep to come.</p><p>It didn’t, though, and she found herself growing more wakeful, dwelling on the curious aftertaste fouling up her mouth. There was the smell of pancakes in the air, birds chirping outside, a noise to her left, and Bethany did not care what Lea was up to, she really didn’t. She’d take another potion if she had to, but fifteen minutes later when she opened her eyes, she found only empty vials. Had she gone through them already? Couldn’t be. She’d made enough for five days at least. But then… she really had no idea how much time had passed.</p><p>She rubbed her hand down her face. She’d just have to make more.</p><p>Of course, when she peered over into the room proper, she saw her sister hovering over the fire with a kettle. Maker’s breath, if Bethany saw her make another pot of tea, she would—</p><p>She would ignore her, forever, as she already intended. Eventually Lea would give up and leave. She was good at that.</p><p>Bethany carefully avoided looking at Lea while she prepared her potions bench for the task at hand. But when she opened a drawer to find it empty, followed by another and another, Lea decided to break the silence.</p><p>“You won’t find any deathroot in there.” Bethany glared at her sister, leaning back in her chair, one foot propped up against the table as she tipped and wobbled on the back two legs. “Nor any black lotus, should you get ideas. Nor blood lotus, either. In fact, lotuses of any sort are right out. No felandaris, vandal aria, nor ghoul’s beard if you are feeling particularly stupid.”</p><p>“You absolute cow.” Bethany slammed the drawer shut hard enough for the entire table to rattle.</p><p>“There’s plenty of elfroot if you have a headache. And embrium. Good quality, too. Though I think you’ve had enough herbs for today, haven’t you?” Lea held a dish up to show it to her. “Pancakes?”</p><p>Bethany clenched her jaw so hard her teeth were mashing together. Why did she look so satisfied with herself? What had she done? “You switched my potion,” Bethany breathed, her fingernails digging into her palms.</p><p>“You should be more careful about what you drink. I didn’t even bother getting the color right. There’s bacon, too, if you want it.”</p><p>Bethany’s chest heaved with all the anger seething through her body. After everything she’d done—<em>or didn’t do—</em>Lea had no right to mess with her things. Maker, she might have been angrier than she’d ever been in her whole life, angrier than when her uncle sold her to mercenaries to pay his debts, angrier than she was left behind in the Roads to die with strangers, angrier than when they told her she couldn’t have children and she’d never stop fighting and it was a slow death and it was <em>for life</em>. She wanted nothing more than to shove Lea out the door and maybe off a balcony, but definitely away from her. <em>For good. </em></p><p>She reached for her magic, hand already making the fist that would drive her sister off her chair and out of her sight, but she found nothing. No magic, no Fade. Just silence.</p><p>
  <em>Magebane. </em>
</p><p>“You—” Lea didn’t even have the decency to look pleased with herself, just frowning in what she must have imagined was an apologetic manner. “You <em>poisoned </em>me.”</p><p>“Let’s not be dramatic about it. You were already poisoning yourself. I just switched the vials.”</p><p>Bethany lunged. Lea hadn’t been expecting that, and Bethany enjoyed a moment of vicious pleasure watching her face manifest shock and then fear as she was tackled to the floor, the chair tipping over and Lea landing on her back with a thud. Bethany had never bothered learning hand to hand combat like her siblings, but little girls never forgot how to pull hair and hit and scratch their <em>stupid</em>, <em>cruel,</em> <em>horrible</em> older sisters.</p><p>There were no thoughts in her head, just pure rage and bitter satisfaction every time Lea howled in pain. She wasn’t even fighting back, just trying to scramble out from under Bethany’s onslaught and shouting at her to stop. Lea threw her hands up to cover her face, so Bethany grabbed a hank of hair and <em>pulled</em>. She flailed as her head was yanked to the side, and Bethany’s hand connected with her face, the slap ringing across the room.</p><p>This was apparently the last straw for Lea. She threw an elbow into Bethany’s chest, knocking her back enough to get to her feet. Bethany rubbed at it, the breath knocked out of her. No matter, the broken chair was shattered around them, and Bethany picked up a splintered leg and brandished it.</p><p>Lea’s mouth dropped open as if to say, <em>you can’t be serious, </em>but Bethany <em>was </em>serious, and it was only a flash of blue across her vision that stopped her from swinging. Strong hands pinned her arms behind her back, and she kicked uselessly at Lea.  </p><p>“Enough,” came a low growl in her ear, so she kicked behind her at Fenris instead. He tightened his grip on her wrists until the chair leg thumped to the floor, and Lea, eyes wide, hair wild, and blood smeared across her face, ducked out the door.</p><p>“I’m going to <em>kill </em>her,” Bethany shouted, still kicking even as Fenris lifted her off the floor.</p><p>“You would regret it,” he replied, almost bored-sounding while Bethany tried and failed to wriggle out of his grasp, “Killing your sister will not bring back anything you’ve lost. You will feel no satisfaction.”</p><p>“And I suppose you’d stop me,” she spat, as if he didn’t have her entirely and effortlessly incapacitated.</p><p>“So it would seem.”</p><p>“I don’t care if you kill me.”</p><p>Fenris laughed, but not very nicely. “If you truly did not care, you would have already become an abomination. You have chosen survival.”</p><p>“And <em>she</em> poisoned me,” Bethany snarled, jerking one way and then the other.  </p><p>“Magebane is not deadly. And she did not force it on you.”</p><p>As if sleep were the same thing as being cut off from the Fade. As if choosing for herself were the same as Lea choosing for her, like she’d always done.</p><p>Then she realized—cut off from the Fade, even if she did fall asleep, she wouldn’t see him. Her ribcage crumbled with the knowledge, all the anger collapsing on itself. “She <em>left</em> him to <em>die</em>.” It came out as a sob, and there was no fight left in her. Maker, she was tired. Not sleepy, but <em>tired</em>. Too weak by half and Fenris wouldn’t let her go.</p><p>“And I think you know Alistair well enough to know that he’d try to save her life if he could.”</p><p>“Don’t tell me what I know,” she snapped. Fenris had never even <em>met </em>him. He had no right to speak of him. He’d looked scared when she was pulled from the memory. He’d looked <em>awful</em>. And now she was <em>stuck. </em></p><p>“Then I will say this: Hawke would let you kill her if she thought it would help. It won’t. So I am asking you not to.”</p><p>With that they fell into silence. Bethany stopped struggling, but Fenris did not release her until her breathing returned to something approximating normal. “Just tell her to leave me alone,” she muttered, rubbing at her wrists.  </p><p>“I think even Hawke has received that message by now.”</p><p>She slumped in a non-broken chair after he was gone, fingers tugging on her own hair. She knew the memories would be there when she slept again, but she wanted them <em>now</em>. They were her memories, she could just imagine them up herself, but it wasn’t the same. They felt real. They were infused with his thoughts and she wanted to hear all of them. But instead the world was silent and empty and pointless.</p><p>With nothing better to do, she stared at the fire, tearing off bits of pancake from the plates her sister had left behind and chewing like a woman who had forgotten how.  </p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0014"><h2>14. Alistair</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Alistair was alone. He’d been alone, hadn’t he? All this time. All this forever that stretched in either direction for as far as he could think. But now he was… really alone. Again.</p><p>He was cold. He’d shiver if he still remembered how.</p><p>“Beth,” he croaked, his throat a little drier each time, a little harder to use, “I don’t like it here very much.”</p><p>And then he laughed, because it was such a stupid thing to say, both useless and a massive understatement and somehow utterly true. He laughed, and it was almost like shivering.</p><p>“Beth,” he whispered, invoking her like he may have once invoked a deity, “I want to go home.”</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0015"><h2>15. Hawke</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>A reader just told me that every chapter of this fic was like being stabbed. Hawke had very much the same sentiment regarding this chapter.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Fenris was right.</p><p>It wasn’t a new thought. Honestly, Hawke had it so regularly she might as well tattoo it to the back of her hand. But he was right every time he watched her carrying tea up the stairs and sighed. He was right with every word he held back as she fussed in her sister’s tower. Every raised eyebrow at the lunches Bethany didn’t touch. And he was most right when he held Bethany back and jerked his head toward to door, telling Hawke to get out.</p><p>She was not helping.</p><p>Her little sister, her <em>only </em>family, and she was not helping her. She didn’t know how.</p><p>The next best thing she could think of to do was leave, though she didn’t know where they’d go. There was that future again, knocking her about the ears. Maker, if Fenris was so keen on the whole thing, maybe it was his turn to figure it out.</p><p>She wiped the blood off her face, worked out the tangles in her hair, and when she heard Fenris’s footsteps approach the door, she called, “Can you believe Varric used to call her Sunshine?”</p><p>He huffed in what was almost a laugh, and Hawke would take it. Not enough laughter recently. Not from him.</p><p>He stepped through the door with an eyebrow already raised. “Are you going to tell me that in addition to being a mage that levels mountains, Bethany can overwhelm the Champion of Kirkwall in unarmed combat?”</p><p>Hawke huffed in what was distinctly not a laugh. “I didn’t want to hurt her.”</p><p>Now that induced a response—strangled laughter that bubbled up through his nose and then out his mouth, like even he didn’t know it was about to happen. “She did not feel the same.”</p><p>He took a seat next to her on the bed as she joined him in laughter that didn’t really feel all that funny but somehow also did. The way Bethy’s claws had come out when she lunged—Hawke would never forget it. “Well I always knew she wasn’t a morning person, but that was ridiculous.”</p><p>“Hawke—”</p><p>Not his worst rebuke of her, laughter still on his breath, but she waved him away. “I know, I know. It’s time to move on. But I’ve thought about it very deeply for the last five minutes or so, and I’ve decided to make<em> you</em> choose where we go. North, south, east or west, the world is yours, although I veto Orlais.”</p><p>It took him less than a minute to decide. “In that case, east.”</p><p>Smart. Away from the Breach and the cold winter of Ferelden, and the north was mainly impassable anyway. “We could go to Starkhaven,” she suggested, trying to remember what was east of here, “Visit with Sebastian.”</p><p>Fenris rolled his eyes. “Starkhaven is to the west. And fine, but only on our way elsewhere.”</p><p>She kissed him on the nose, leaving a smudge of rouge in her wake. “We’ll leave as soon as you pick a destination.”</p><p>With that, they spent the morning packing. They didn’t have much, but Hawke had managed to spread it around the room they’d claimed. Fenris left to secure a map from the Wardens—as if he needed it when he already knew where everything was, she teased—and then they planned to raid the pantry, steal two horses, and leave. To Starkhaven. Or wherever.</p><p>She supposed she should tell Bethany she was going. That would be the polite thing, if not the intelligent thing. After all, Bethany probably wouldn’t try to kill her again. And anyway, Hawke had her armor on this time and the magebane probably hadn’t worn off, so the worst she could do was pull out more hair, and that all grew back soon enough.</p><p>She did not anticipate finding Bethany in the hall, staring at the door to her own abandoned bedroom. Hawke took a deep breath to steel herself. If Bethany did attack her again, it would be so much more embarrassing to be witnessed by more than just Fenris. Better to focus on dodging her attacks.</p><p>“Betha—"</p><p>“He’s alive,” Bethany stated, still staring at her own door. “He’s alive in the Fade.”</p><p>Well that… was an altogether different sort of… Maker. Fuck. Hawke blinked, her stance falling slack as she tried to contend with whatever the fuck this was. “It’s been months, Bethy,” Hawke replied slowly, “There’s no way…”</p><p>“You can’t know that,” she snarled. Hawke involuntarily took a step back from her. Okay, so maybe leaving at <em>this </em>moment was a bit of a mistake. <em>Sorry, Fenris. Just until Bethany finds her marbles again. </em>“You’ve never left anyone in the Fade before,” Bethany continued, “We don’t know what that does to a person.”</p><p>There was no food there, no water Hawke would dare drink. No sunlight, no days or nights or anything alive. It had been months. Hawke had a decent idea what that did to a person.</p><p>“I see him in my dreams. Our memories together, but he tells me things I couldn’t possibly know. Like he’s telling me a story. Our story.”</p><p>“If it’s your dreams—”</p><p>“It’s not a demon,” she snapped.</p><p>Hawke congratulated herself for having the foresight to wear her armor to this meeting before saying gently, “There was a spirit we encountered in the Fade who took on the form of a woman who died there. She looked just like her, spoke like her, but she was a spirit. The real woman was gone.”</p><p>Bethany put her hand on the door, eyes closed tight, the lines deep across her brow. “I don’t need you to believe me. I don’t need you at all.”</p><p>She shoved the door open.</p><p>“Bethy—”</p><p>“Just… shut up.”</p><p>“What are you planning on doing?”</p><p>Bethany ignored her in favor of grabbing things out of her dresser. Packing. She was packing for whatever fool plan she had.</p><p>“Bethany, just wait. How are you going to find him?”</p><p>No answer. Just her chin jutting out and pursed lips that said she was done with this conversation. Done with Hawke. She jammed her boots on her feet and tossed her tabard on. And if Hawke couldn’t convince her to stop, well then—</p><p>“I’ll help you.”</p><p>Bethany spun around at that. “Like you helped him?”</p><p>Hawke had no answer for that.</p><p>But Bethany did. “I thought, nothing could happen to him. He’s… so strong.” Bethany swallowed, shaking her head. “And the legendary Hawke is with him. My big sister would never let him charge head first into certain death. But you lose people.” Her tone took on a cutting edge. “It’s what you do. You lost Carver and you lost mother and Anders and me. You even lost Varric. They imprisoned him, but they wanted you, and you let him take the fall. Can’t cage the great Hawke, but she has no end of friends who will throw themselves into the fire for her. So no, I don’t need your help.”</p><p>Bethany turned back to her packing with a sniff, the rustle of cloth and leather the only sounds in the room. Strange, that. When the Arishok had plunged both blades into Hawke’s belly, she’d remembered how loud it had all seemed. The rushing in her ears overpowering everything else in the room. Perhaps it was the silence that caused her to grab this blade and pull it deeper, straight out of her sister’s hands.</p><p>“You can say it,” she called, filling up the room with her voice, “The rest of it. That thing you’ve been wanting to say ever since I arrived. You can just say it.”</p><p>Bethany barely spared her a glance when she replied, easily, “It should have been you.”</p><p>“I know.” It was barely more than a whisper, not that it mattered. Didn’t change anything. She breathed in slowly, once, twice, and blinked away whatever tears misread their welcome here. Because, everything aside, Hawke was not about to let Bethany die to rectify her mistakes. “Well,” she said as lightly as she could, “Now that that unpleasantness is out of the way, I should tell you, the Inquisition will never help you.” Bethany paused in her work for just a moment, then continued, yanking the straps on her pack tight. But at least Hawke had guessed rightly there. Easy enough to win this argument now. “The Inquisitor ejected all the Wardens from Orlais. They won’t want you around, and they won’t care about saving him.”</p><p>Bethany scoffed. “The Inquisition has no authority over the Wardens.”</p><p>“Take that up with our old friend Cullen. Regardless, they won’t help you get into the Fade.” Hawke waited for that to sink in, counting to five, enough time for Bethany to believe her, not enough time to come up with another plan. “But I know who can.”</p><p>“Who?” she demanded.</p><p>Almost. Hawke almost had her. “She won’t help you without me. You’re not doing this alone.”</p><p>Bethany tightened one last strap on her pack, yanking it so hard it was a wonder it didn’t break clean off.</p><p>“Tell her we’re coming then,” she said as she left the room.  </p><p><em>Got her.</em> And when she could no longer hear Bethany’s footsteps, Hawke slumped to the floor, wrapped her arms around her legs, and cried.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Hawke would also like me to please, please stop stabbing her now.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0016"><h2>16. Fenris</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Thank you to Luzial for helping me with this chapter!!</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Fenris walked into their room to find Hawke’s things bundled up neatly in pack on their bed, and Hawke was nowhere to be found.</p><p>He wandered the old keep and was informed she’d been seen in the rookery, in the kitchens, in the pantry. On the walls, a Warden told him, pointing west. It was after dark when he found her in the guardhouse, feet on the windowsill as she tipped back in a chair, bottle of amber liquid in her hand. For both their sakes, he hoped it hadn’t been full when she pilfered it from the Warden’s shelves.</p><p>“Fenris,” she greeted him in a slow, drunken singsong. He took the bottle from her, swallowing a mouthful of the harsh alcohol before setting it out of her reach. “Change of plans,” she drawled, her smile completely absent from her eyes, “We’re going to Kirkwall.”</p><p>That… would explain the drinking. Or the drinking would explain the change of plans. Either way, his hand now itched to take up the bottle and join her in this endeavor. But then Hawke opened her mouth again. “Bethy thinks Alistair is still alive and we’re going to go get him back.”</p><p>Well. Shit.</p><p>Fenris did take another swig of her alcohol then, letting it burn slowly on his tongue before he swallowed. So here it was, the quest that would get them all killed. “Get him back how?” he asked.</p><p>She sighed. “It’s a secret. You can’t tell her. Not until we’re on the boat at least, but even then… she might toss me overboard if she thinks she can get away with it.” Hawke laughed, sort of. The red rimming about her eyes made it less believable. “But I sent some birds today and we’ll be off by the end of the week. We’re going to use Merrill’s mirror and drag out his corpse. Give him a proper funeral.”</p><p>“You can’t be serious.”</p><p>“Well… Bethy thinks he’s alive somehow, so if she’s right, I’ll cancel the cremation services. The wake might still be applicable, though. You know, because of all the dreaming.”</p><p>Fenris ignored her attempt at humor. Bethany, half mad with grief, was not right. And Hawke—<em>fuck</em>. It was just like her. Never could say no. The more dangerous, the more foolhardy, the more <em>hopeless, </em>the less chance of her making a good decision. “It’s suicide,” he growled, “She cannot bear to live without him, so she’s concocted some fool plan, and you’re going along with it out of guilt.”</p><p>Hawke nodded, like she was well aware already. And that—that was worse. She didn’t even <em>believe </em>in what she was doing, but she’d lay down her life to do it, because Bethany asked. “Come to think of it,” she said, “Most of the plan was mine actually. Concocted it myself.”</p><p>“Hawke.”</p><p>She stood up then, steadier on her feet than he might have expected, and placed a hand on his arm. “Then… maybe I’ll meet you in Starkhaven after.”</p><p>Fenris felt his stomach turn to ice. She could not mean—she could not mean to leave him behind again. Not again.</p><p>But she kept talking. “You don’t like visiting the Fade even in your sleep. And it’s awful there. Spiders everywhere. Just… stick with the Wardens or Sebastian or—” The rest of her sentence withered under his gaze.</p><p>“You promised.” Fenris swallowed, dread curling its repulsive hands around his spine. “You promised you wouldn’t do this again. You wouldn’t go off without me again.”</p><p>“That was before—before we were going to… I don’t want you to…”</p><p>She let the pieces of her sentences hang in the air. Fenris glared at his arm where she still touched him until she slowly pulled away.</p><p>Didn’t want him to what?</p><p>It had been her idea to help the Inquisition alone. He hadn’t thought—their lives were dangerous, and he hadn’t thought anything of it at the time, other than regret starting about three days after she left, calculating how long it would take to catch up with her. She hadn’t cared for their separation—her words. Hadn’t cared for it. Fenris yearned, that was his word for it. He’d yearned not just for her but for them, and what they could be. It had taken her leaving for him to realize what they could have, if they were to reach for it together.</p><p>But every minute she’d been back, they’d been out of step. Like while she was gone she had locked herself up, and Fenris no longer held the key. And now…</p><p>And now she wanted to leave.</p><p>“Do you want to marry me?” he asked, not an invitation this time, but a question.   </p><p>“No.”</p><p>Her answer was fast, efficient, devastating, and she looked about as horrified as he felt. <em>No</em>. She didn’t clarify, or change her mind, or try to explain. Just no.</p><p>It was like all of the air leaving the room, taking with it not just the hopes he’d cradled on the long journey to Jader, but the foundation of his life that he thought he understood. Like being plunged nine years into the past, when he was alone, and he could not imagine what his life would look like in a week, never mind a month. The cold of his memory crept down his back, and his teeth were aching from how hard he clenched his jaw shut.</p><p>The silence stretched, and after three false starts, his voice sticking in his throat, Fenris asked, “Do you want me to leave?”</p><p>“No.” She closed her eyes, and when the tears slipped out anyway, she swore while wiping them away.</p><p>Fenris ignored his own tears as they slipped down his cheeks. “Is there someone else?”</p><p>“No,” she cried. “No, Maker, no. I love you. I only love you.”</p><p>So it was just his future that she didn’t want. Still, he couldn’t stop himself from asking, “Then why?”</p><p>“He called himself Hawke,” she said as if that meant anything at all. “He introduced himself as Alistair Hawke, and he smiled, and I called him little brother, and two months later he was dead.”</p><p>“I don’t understand.”</p><p>“And Bethany,” she continued, “She’s… she’s ruined. Shadow of a person. Gutted and emptied. And I don’t blame her one bit, I don’t. Because I don’t know how I… I’d never…”</p><p>Hard enough to untangle the threads of Hawke’s mind when she was sober, never mind when they were both crying for reasons Fenris no longer understood. “What does this have to do with us?”</p><p>“I’ll <em>lose </em>you,” she sobbed before slapping her hand over her mouth. Through her fingers, she said, “I know it. I feel it. It’s a curse, it’s—it’s—it’s a gift you told me to give back. Everyone slipping through… I had a little brother again for five <em>minutes </em>before he died in front of me. She married him, everything was fine, then he travels with me and he’s dead.”</p><p>Fenris ran a hand through his hair. “You think you caused his death?”</p><p>“I think—” She ran a hand across her brow, pushing the hair away from her eyes— ”If you had come with me to Adamant, there’s no doubt in my mind you would have been the one stuck in the Fade. I think I get people killed.”</p><p>“Then stop accepting fool missions,” he snapped. He felt her words swimming in circles around his head, but he was no closer to understanding her. “None of this has anything to do with marriage.”</p><p>She slumped back into her chair. Her hand flexed for want of a bottle. He would not hand it over, and she didn’t ask. “I can’t say no to Bethy. She’ll die without me.”</p><p><em>Which is it, Hawke, </em>he wanted to ask, <em>You get people killed, or you keep them alive?  </em></p><p>“And me?” he asked, pitifully, “What will I do without you?”</p><p>She shook her head, as if confused by the question. “Nothing. You don’t have to be without me. I don’t want you to be without me.”</p><p>“Are you even listening to yourself?”</p><p>“No.”</p><p>He laughed, though there was no humor in it.</p><p>Fenris left her in the gatehouse, snatching her alcohol on the way out. He didn’t trust her not to kill herself with it, and then, because it truly was nine years ago and all his anger and hurt had nowhere to go, he threw it over the wall, as hard as he could. The sound of it breaking on the rocks was less satisfying than he remembered the wine bottle shattering in his room, and he made a mental note of that if he was to be smashing things again.</p><p><em>If I asked her to storm the Black City, </em>he thought, <em>she would do it, but she doesn’t want to marry me. </em></p><p>Then he wondered, both hands against the wall to brace himself, if to Hawke, saying yes back in Jader was the same as saying yes to entering the Fade. He asked her, and it was something he wanted, so she said yes, regardless of what it meant for her.</p><p>He sat on the cold stone of the wall, feet dangling over the edge until he felt his joints would never warm up again. He’d told himself he was prepared for this—Hawke’s grief. Hawke’s choices. She would set herself on fire to keep Bethany warm, and if he pointed out the danger, she would simply invite him closer and burn twice as fast.</p><p>It wasn’t what he wanted.</p><p>Neither of them had to live <em>for </em>anyone anymore. She was no longer Kirkwall’s Champion, and he kept waiting for the tension in her shoulders to reflect that she’d set the mantle down. It took him three years on the run and six more in Kirkwall before he freed himself of Danarius and started living. Hawke had only just finished her three years on the run. Meeting her had been enough to stall his feet, to settle. He had hoped…  </p><p>Perhaps his timing had been less than ideal.</p><p>He dragged a frozen hand down his face. Hawke would never leave him in the middle of the night, afraid to even look him in the face. She would leave him little by little, smiling all the while, until she was hollow, until she collapsed on herself.</p><p>Until she got herself killed.</p><p>
  <em>He called himself Hawke. </em>
</p><p>Fenris had never put much stock in names. That was the purview of the nobility, an obsession with blood and alliances. Given that Hawke refused to use her own, the one she received from her mother, to honor her and her Amell line, he assumed she felt the same. Others had pushed him to reclaim his old name years ago, or at least pick a new one. Hawke never did. Varric had asked him if, in their intimate moments, he still called her Hawke, or if he called her Leandra. Fodder for his book, more than likely, but Fenris responded with the truth: the name Leandra brought to mind only Hawke’s mother, and it wasn’t an image he wanted to invoke in their private moments.</p><p>But if they married, he would be Fenris Hawke. With no last name of his own, it only made sense. And in Hawke’s guilt-ridden mind, it was the name that conferred the risk, and not the constant threat of blood mages, demons, blight, and now the Breach. That was what she had tried to tell him so fumblingly.</p><p>He blew life back into his hands, his breath not nearly enough to soothe the ache of cold. It was time to make a decision. Hawke didn’t want him to come to Kirkwall, and she didn’t want him to leave her. He supposed that meant the choice was up to him.</p><p>He chose her.</p><p>Hawke was under the covers already when he slipped into their bedroom. She slept so easily, even more so with the help of alcohol, but she was awake she he joined her in bed.</p><p>“Fen?”</p><p>“I am here.”</p><p>Her hand crept over first, then the rest of her body as she pressed herself to him. And despite everything, it was relieving to have her cling to him like she couldn’t bear to let him go.</p><p>“I’m sorry,” she said directly into his arm.</p><p>He shifted to his side so he could hold her back, shoving a cold foot between hers.</p><p>“I’m going with you to Kirkwall.” She stiffened, but her fingers curled even tighter around his nightshirt. “And if you are going to enter the Fade, Hawke, I’m coming with you.”</p><p>She sighed, slow and steady. Then she shifted so that both of his cold feet were nestled between her calves, her face now pressed against his chest, near his heart. He ran his fingers through her hair, and everything still hurt, but not as much.</p><p>“Would you make me a promise?” she asked, and Fenris had to pull himself out of dozing to answer.</p><p>Promises were not exactly his favorite topic at the moment. “You broke your last promise to me.”</p><p>“Only in spirit.”</p><p>He huffed into her hair. “What is the promise?”</p><p>“If the situation calls for life-threatening heroics—we do it together. No matter what. I don’t—I don’t want to spend the rest of my life thinking about how you died for me. I don’t know how I’d survive it. I wouldn’t, I think, so it would be a waste anyway.”</p><p>It wasn’t her worst idea. He could understand it, even. “Very well, Hawke. If you promise not to lay down your life for me, I promise I won’t lay mine down for you.”</p><p>“I promise.”</p><p>That remained to be seen. But for now, Fenris was determined to remain to see it.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Fenris looking directly at the audience: unfortunately, I love her.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0017"><h2>17. Bethany</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Bethany couldn’t sleep.</p><p>It was nighttime. It had been nighttime for hours and would soon enough be morning time. After a week of almost continuous sleep, she felt ridiculous not being able to force herself into it now.</p><p>Lea had not given her her herbs back.</p><p>But every time she started to drift off, she thought of Alistair, alive, waiting on the other side, and her heart pounded so loud she was agitated back to wakefulness. It was all very counterproductive. She hadn’t counted how many times her eyes had snapped opened with a start, but she’d guess at least ten since she first crawled onto her cot.</p><p>It was all so stupid. He was there, waiting, and she was here, tossing and turning and cursing herself because she could not control her own heart well enough to see him as she had done for weeks now without trying. And Maker, she wanted to see him. To make sure she was right. She knew in her heart she was right, she had to be right, but she would feel better once she’d slipped into the Fade and spoken to him.</p><p>He’d been trying to tell her. This whole time. She’d thought… Maker, she hadn’t thought, and that was the entire problem. Lea showed up, and the entire world had turned into a gray haze of pain and smothering loneliness that blended into her own thoughts so well she occasionally forgot she existed at all. It had blotted out all reasoning. All everything. Of course they were Alistair’s memories. He narrated them. What had she <em>thought </em>was happening?</p><p>Bethany gave up on sleeping. Clearly she had slept enough in recent days and her body didn’t need it, and if she stayed in this cot any longer with no company other than her own thoughts, she’d lose her mind. Instead she busied herself with packing and repacking. She’d done an absolutely shit job the first time, and it was probably lucky Lea had said they couldn’t leave for another couple days, because it gave her a chance to mull over what sort of things she actually needed to bring to wherever they were going.</p><p>For one thing, if they were getting Alistair back, she probably should have packed clothes for him.</p><p>She remembered the way he’d looked, tied up or chained or whatever it was that held him, his armor rent, and she doubled her first aid supplies. Packed his spare shaving kit, too, and his favorite pair of socks. Progress was slow, because occasionally a voice in her head that sounded too much like Lea told her she was wrong and he was dead, and she had to sit back and breathe, just breathe until she could focus again.</p><p>By the time she was finished, her bag much bulkier than her first try, the sun was up. For the first time since Lea arrived, Bethany went to the training yards, practice staff in hand, and began to move. Her muscles were stiff, and the first five minutes were absolute torture, sweat beading at every pore as Bethany tried to remember what having muscles had felt like. She was certain they were still there, if dormant. It hadn’t been <em>that </em>long since she’d done this. Done anything at all. Her wooden staff might as well have been made of granite the way her arms protested, and her legs were not much better.</p><p><em>I’ll sleep well after this, </em>she thought, wiping the sweat from her eyes. Other Wardens filed out for their morning practice, though none asked to spar with her. They simply wished her a good morning or greeted her with a nod, and Samuel slammed a kettle of tea down by the weapons racks in an open invitation for anyone who wanted it. When Bethany’s hands were so slippery with sweat she thought she might drop her staff, Sigrun tossed her a water skein, which she did drop in the dirt. Drank the entire thing while watching Elia empty a quiver into a bullseye.</p><p>Everything was so normal, as if nothing had happened at all. As if she hadn’t been in her bed for a month, as if Alistair weren’t trapped in some unreality only accessible in her dreams. Then her eyes landed on Lea, sitting on the wooden fence that encircled the yard and flipping a knife in the air. How long had she been watching?</p><p> “I’ve just had word,” she called when she saw Bethany watching, “Our boat will be in the Ostwick harbor tomorrow. We were lucky on the timing.”</p><p>Bethany rolled her eyes and walked over to her so she wouldn’t have to shout. “Lots of boats leave from Ostwick every day.” Lea still hadn’t told her where they were headed, but it hardly mattered. It was a busy port. They could leave now if they tried.</p><p>“Yes, but we’re taking this one. Be ready to leave in the morning.” Lea hopped off the fence and turned to go inside.</p><p><em>I’m already ready, </em>Bethany wanted to grumble. Instead, she blurted out to Lea’s back, “I tried to kill you yesterday.”</p><p>Lea stopped, flipping her knife into the air one last time before securing it at her belt. “Who hasn’t?” she replied before turning around with a strange smile. “Anyway, you stopped trying to kill me, and that’s the thought that really counts. Growth.”</p><p>Bethany weighed the option of killing her right now just to prove a point, but her heart wasn’t really in it. Besides, she’d heard Lea say that same thing before, years ago. “You said that about Fenris once.”</p><p>“Did I?”</p><p>“When he thought we’d broken into his mansion. Well, we <em>had </em>broken into his mansion. He waved his sword at us a bit.”</p><p>Lea grinned. “Now look at us. We get along like a house on fire.”</p><p>“Who’s the house and who’s the fire?”</p><p>Lea shrugged as her smile fell away, and that felt good at least. Difficult to get her sister at a loss for words. She always had so many lined up and ready.</p><p>Lea slunk away after that, and Bethany spent the day in relative peace, just waiting for the sun to go down.</p><p>“Did you also see a parade of about twenty nugs on that bridge up ahead, or am I just hungry again?” Alistair asked, peering down one fork in the road, then another.</p><p>“I was too busy watching our rear,” Bethany replied automatically, “But tell Elia to bag one if you see another. I’m tired of mushrooms.”</p><p>“Do you suppose we should follow the nugs?”</p><p>“You’re Warden-Commander Hawke, what do you think we should do?”</p><p>Alistair grinned. “I wonder how well a storm cloud can fry bacon?” And then, with a totally different voice, he said, “You know, Beth, turns out even with magic you’re a lousy cook. Not that it matters in the Deep Roads. But there’s crunchy and then there’s… struck by lightning.”</p><p>She was dreaming. This was a dream—a memory—and Alistair was here. She had to tell him. But she couldn’t seem to open her mouth to say what she wanted to say. Instead she turned to the rest of the Wardens and began herding them toward the supposed nug parade.</p><p><em>Alistair, we’re coming for you</em>, she thought as loudly as she could. <em>It’s me, the real me, and I’m going to get you out. </em></p><p>The ground beneath their feet began to shake. An earthquake in the Roads was a disaster, a way that more than one entire contingent of Wardens had been lost. The Wardens all ran for Bethany, who was already throwing up a barrier, but Alistair stood still, looking at his feet. “I don’t remember this,” he groaned. “This isn’t right.”</p><p>What it was was terrifying. Bethany watched a crack climb up the wall, and she prayed there wasn’t lava behind it. “This never happened,” Alistair said, “Not like this.”</p><p>“<em>Alistair</em>,” Bethany cried, finding her voice as the cave began to crumble around them, “I’m going to find you.”</p><p>“Beth?” His eyes met hers for only an instant before the ceiling of the cave completely collapsed around her barrier. And then it was her and a handful of Wardens in a tiny bubble as long as she could hold it up. But they had been his eyes, Alistair’s <em>real </em>eyes, dark and haunted and <em>sad. </em></p><p>“Hang on!” she yelled through the stone between them. “Please, Alistair, hang on until I find you.”</p><p>She woke up in a cold sweat, gasping. <em>Hang on, Ali. </em></p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0018"><h2>18. Isabela</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>They were the sorriest trio she had ever laid eyes on, standing in the rain like that. Not a one of them even had a hat on. The cold drizzle whipped at their faces in the seaside wind, and Fenris at least had the self-respect to pull his collar up as far as it would go. Hawke stared glumly into the water, just letting the rain soak her. And last, on the opposite side, poor Bethany had turned her face into the wind, eyes closed, as if to welcome it.</p><p>If they had chosen to stand closer together, someone could have benefitted from another acting as a shield. Instead they had chosen to each bear the full brunt of the cold wet. Not exactly the sweet family Isabela had been picturing when she received Hawke’s bird.</p><p>She strode down from her upper deck to greet them as they scurried up the plank one by one, her own hat large enough to provide adequate protection from the weather, and she tried not to take offense when Bethany did not hug her back. “It will be warmer below decks, sweet thing,” she told her, a member of her crew ready to show them their berths and get them out of the way. Fenris wordlessly followed Bethany down, acknowledging her only with a nod, but Isabela took Hawke by the elbow. “Is it just me or is there an odd sort of energy here?”</p><p>Without waiting for a reply, she steered Hawke into her own cabin and sat her down. Hadn’t seen the woman in a year, and she looked more than a little bedraggled.</p><p>“Drink?” she offered, holding out an unopened bottle of rum. Hawke shook her head, water flying everywhere, so Isabela thumped the bottle down on her desk. Shame.</p><p>Hawke, who usually couldn’t help but be the loudest thing in every room, was silent save for the dripping on her floor. “Kirkwall?” Isabela asked. The note on the bird had said very little. <em>We need a lift to Kirkwall. Urgent. Let me know. </em></p><p>Hawke flinched. “You know I haven’t been back in three years? I try not to think about it too hard, or what they might have done to that statue of me. I pay Orana to take care of the estate, but part of me hopes she’s just been taking that money and living her life. Doing whatever. Found a nice husband and has four children who terrorize Lowtown and live well on her earnings. Guess I’ll find out if the entire place has been ransacked soon enough.”</p><p>Isabela drummed her fingers on the table. Once she would have taken Hawke for all she was worth and would have congratulated a servant for doing the same. Welcomed her to her crew with that sort of spirit and a share of the loot. But Isabela had long come to terms with the fact that Hawke had occupied and expanded a previously unused part of her conscience, useless thing really, and there was nothing for it. If she found the Hawke estate looted, she would be peeved. But that clearly wasn’t why they were returning.</p><p>“Kirkwall, Hawke. What’s there?”</p><p>“Merrill.”</p><p>Isabela raised an eyebrow. “You could have asked me to bring her to you.”</p><p>“And… Merrill’s mirror.”</p><p>The miserable picture they painted on the dock wasn’t nearly miserable enough for that answer. Going back to Kirkwall was a bad enough idea even if it had been for something normal, like letting the citizens throw rotten vegetables at Hawke until she finally got over herself, and Isabela had a tomato or two of her own more fit for throwing than eating, but Merrill’s mirror? Isabela had always quietly agreed with Fenris that they should have smashed the thing. But it survived the Blight, the siege of Kirkwall, the chantry explosion and the following rebellion, and it had survived Isabela’s scrutiny in the three years since.</p><p>Worse, Merrill got the damn thing working about a minute after Hawke left. Isabela woke up one morning, hungover as shit, to find Merrill standing in front of it, missing half her arm before she pulled it back from wherever. In one of the few arguments they’d had over the years, Isabela flat out refused to go “adventuring” through a cursed mirror. “If I can’t take a boat through it, I’m not going,” she’d said to Merrill.</p><p>She had a sinking suspicion she’d be breaking that promise in a few days.</p><p>Isabela sighed. “Is this why Fenris looks like he’s hoping the sea will drag him overboard?”</p><p>“One reason.”</p><p>For a few moments there was nothing but the drumming of Isabela’s fingers on the desk and the slow drip of water from Hawke’s clothes to the floor. Fenris and Hawke. That was a thread she didn’t feel like pulling just yet.</p><p>“And Bethany?”</p><p>“I think she’d prefer if it the sea dragged <em>me </em>overboard.” She met Isabela’s eyes then, her rich brown gaze so helpless and desperate she looked years younger than she was for a moment. Just that refugee girl flicking knives in a bar for money who went starry-eyed when she saw Isabela smash a man’s nose in. “I got Alistair killed.”</p><p><em>Oh.</em> That one hurt. Isabela closed her eyes. A different pair of brown eyes in a different tavern, lost and intimidated and blushing all the way through. “Alistair’s dead?”</p><p>Hawke hemmed and hawed, which was an odd response for such a straightforward question. People were dead or they weren’t in her experience. Particularly ones who had been killed.</p><p>Hawke didn’t usually take much prodding to tell a story, and Isabela found she didn’t enjoy having to prod her. Still, Isabela was now on whatever cockeyed quest they’d already started, so she prodded, and Hawke began to talk about the Inquisition. She’d only reached Crestwood when Isabela uncorked her rum with her teeth and took a swig straight from the bottle. Hawke held up a hand to refuse her offer again. Rum might have made the telling easier. Certainly made the listening smoother.</p><p>“But now Bethany thinks he’s still alive in the Fade somehow, and there’s no convincing her otherwise without risk of death to her or me, probably me, and I couldn’t let her go alone, so we’re going to use the mirror. And that’s… that’s the plan.”</p><p>“So he’s not dead?” Isabela asked.</p><p>“I mean he must be,” Hawke muttered to the floor. “I don’t even know how we’re going to find him. Enter the Fade and fish out his corpse or… whatever.”</p><p>“And you <em>have </em>to do this because—”</p><p>“Because without me, Bethany will try to do it anyway, but alone, and nobody should be alone in that place.”</p><p>And Hawke would do anything for Bethany. Maker, of course Fenris wanted to throw himself into the sea. The plan was absurd. Even worse than that time they’d entered the Fade in their sleep and Hawke had stabbed her to death. Humiliating, but at least it wasn’t <em>real. </em>But for Alistair… Hawke would come up with even worse plans for her sister’s husband. Isabela supposed she should only be grateful it wasn’t the Deep Roads.</p><p>“Fenris is going along with this?” she asked, though she didn’t need to. Hawke shrugged, but the man was already on the boat, sailing to Kirkwall, sword on his back. In for a penny, in for a pound. And given that it was <em>Isabela’s</em> boat they were all sailing on, that it had taken a note with ten words on it for her to dump a smuggled shipment at price that barely covered cost and change course, she knew how he felt.</p><p>“That man loves you.”</p><p>Hawke nodded miserably. “More than I deserve.”</p><p>“No, sweet thing,” she corrected her, “Exactly as much as you deserve.”</p><p>She wore that pleading expression again as she said, “He wants to marry me.”</p><p>Not, <em>we’re getting married. </em>Not, as Isabela had assumed, <em>we married each other years ago and never bothered to inform anyone. </em>Not, <em>I don’t really care what the chantry has to say about the activities of my bedroom</em>. Fenris wanted, and Hawke, well, Isabela supposed Hawke was doing what she’d been doing for the last three years. Floundering.</p><p>Andraste’s tits, where was Varric when she needed him for some useless advice? “Now I’m not one to advocate for the benefits of the bonds of matrimony”—Hawke snorted—“But do you really think it would change much between you two?”</p><p>“No, I don’t.”</p><p>“Then have done with it.”</p><p>Hawke nodded, a miserable little thing, and it was about time for Isabela to check on her crew and actually do some work. She left Hawke somewhere behind her, stumbling into every wall of the boat as the ocean tossed her around.  </p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0019"><h2>19. Alistair</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p><em>Hang on</em>, the voice echoed. <em>Hang on, hang on, hang on. </em></p><p><em>To what?</em> Alistair would have asked if there was anyone to listen. <em>With what? </em></p><p>He’d had hands once, large ones. Reliable. Fumbling but strong. Useful for hanging, if necessary. He’d definitely hung off of things before. Ledges and the like. They’d been through things, his hands. He had a scar on all but one finger on his left hand, courtesy of a sword, knife, gravel, and a shockingly aggressive bird in that order. Two burns on his right, one from an emissary and one from a sneakily hot cookpot. Lentils everywhere. Pinky never felt quite right after that. But now—his pinky didn’t feel much of anything at all, if he still even had one. Alistair wiggled it, or tried to anyway, remembered what it felt like to have a hand and command it to wiggle. He was rewarded for his efforts with pain that streaked up his memory of an arm and settled where his neck should be, blinding him until the landscape before him crushed itself into blackness then stretched and stretched again, all blurred and dim and useless.  </p><p><em>I’m all hands, </em>he’d once said, as if they weren’t any good. An apology. <em>To who?</em></p><p><em>Hang on</em>.</p><p>Alistair wasn’t hanging in any sense of the word. Sitting at best, and even that he couldn’t be sure of. Sitting required legs, and he wasn’t going to tempt fate by searching for those. Hanging by a thread, now there was a thought. Those had all snapped, of that he was certain. Hung out to dry maybe. Could be. Hanging on her words, hanging on her lips again.</p><p><em>Beth</em>.</p><p>They were <em>her</em> words. <em>Hang on, Ali</em>. But he couldn’t remember why.</p><p>It was getting harder to hold her here. Her eyes, her hair, her hands, he couldn’t quite force them all together at the same time, create her image and keep her in front of him. There was a freckle on her shoulder he’d once pressed his lips to, or—no, it was her thigh or…</p><p><em>I got this one jumping off a swing as a child,</em> she’d said, pointing to the old, raised gash that he could now see in perfect clarity, even while her face was masked in a hazy fog. <em>Carver didn’t want to get in trouble, because we weren’t supposed to be out, so we didn’t tell my father and have him just heal it. </em></p><p>Her knee. He’d kissed her knee.</p><p>The sky rippled, and now he’d done it. The air itself began to change, to sour, a familiar smell that plunged him into the dark. His ears popped. And it was good, because the memories were always better than this place, anything was better than this place, and the silence and the echoes and his body that wasn’t really there, and at the same time, he dreaded it. Like being submerged in icy water, and only after he’d given up struggling, finding that he could breathe, that he could have breathed the whole time. But then after he found himself back on shore, dripping wet, cold, and he couldn’t remember how. Or why.</p><p>Alistair was in the Roads, but that wasn’t so bad. Not this part anyway. The thaig was in good shape, lava walls emitting a decent heat, and they hadn’t seen a spider in three days. They’d camp here tonight, maybe longer. He was more concerned with the constant drip of water, though it was almost soothing. Nothing was meant to be soothing in the Roads, but there it was. Fresh water, trickling down into a cracked cistern. It glimmered as it pooled, and Alistair found himself wanting to drink it. Stick his tongue out and just—</p><p>“I wouldn’t if I were you,” Bethany warned him. She always looked pretty lit up by lava light. Warm. Like it revealed her hidden glow. “Remember that time Samuel drank from that ‘magic spring, what could go wrong’ and hallucinated for three days? We were stuck next to that spring until he could walk straight again.”</p><p>“No,” he replied, which wasn’t right. He wasn’t supposed to say that, but he didn’t remember Samuel getting sick. He didn’t remember what he was supposed to say. Alistair dragged his hand down his face, then stared at the fingers. Two scars. Only two scars. No, three. When had he gotten the third?</p><p>“When… when are we?” he asked.</p><p>“Ali?” Bethany’s lips didn’t move. Or at least, they didn’t look like they were moving. He couldn’t even really see them, just her eyes reflecting the red of the walls, and even those were blinking out of focus.</p><p>“I… um—” he rubbed his eyes again “—I—”</p><p>His ears popped again, the pressure bringing him to his knees, and he was alone. He’d <em>been </em>alone, hadn’t he? For a very long time. Someone… someone had been meant to be there with him, when it all ended. But he was alone.</p><p>He slumped onto the cavern floor.</p><p>
  <em>Beth.</em>
</p><p>A plea into the shifting sands of his memory. Like a sieve, it was all pouring out, in all directions. He wanted to scoop it all up, put it back together with his great, fumbling hands, but every time he reached for a memory it was worse, he knew it was worse. Three more fell out the back and all he claimed were wisps between his fingers.  </p><p>“Beth—I can’t remember… I can’t remember why I’m telling you this.”</p><p>“There you are,” she said, which was weird, because he was in his bed.</p><p>“Can’t think of anywhere else I’m meant to be,” he mumbled, which wasn’t right.</p><p>A drop of water hit the back</p><p> of his neck. He rubbed it away with a look up at the ceiling, but there were four stories about this room, there couldn’t possibly be a leak. No, he was thinking of Ostwick, this was Soldier’s Peak, and his bedroom was—they were—</p><p>“It’s raining,” Bethany said.</p><p>Another drop hit his chest plate with a small ‘clink.’ Then another, and he watched one slip right through Bethany’s nose, like she wasn’t real. She opened her mouth, but all he heard was the roar of rain, a sudden deluge in his bedroom.</p><p>“I don’t think this happened,” he groaned as the rain and sleet hit his face. The storm raged right through Bethany, wearing her down until she was a blur, then a silhouette, then nothing.</p><p>He opened his mouth to speak, water and ice caught in his teeth, but what was the point? He couldn’t out-shout the storm, and there was no one to hear him.</p><p>He couldn’t remember how to call her back.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>He's... fine.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0020"><h2>20. Hawke</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The sun had come out by the time Hawke left Isabela’s cabin, trailing behind the admiral as she walked confidently over a floor that was in constant motion. Hawke quickly gave up on the whole moving thing, clutching the door frame and spotting Fenris on deck. He had shed most of his outer layers and was now shining in the sun, helping a man tug on a rope. It seemed an important rope given the concentration they both had on the tugging of it. Whatever the purpose, it certainly gave Hawke a chance to admire Fenris’s arms, and for that, it might have been the most important rope on the entire ship. When they had it tied off, Fenris nodded at her, and she smiled as he crossed the deck on feet surer than her own.</p><p>Isabela’s words bolstered something in her, though she couldn’t say it was a matrimonial mood. A mood, certainly, and she lurched in Fenris’s general direction, grateful when he caught her. Even with his arm to help, she still stumbled into the wall, pulling Fenris with her, only a few steps away from the stairs down to below decks. <em>Now that would have been the utterly wrong kind of tumble</em>, she thought as she kissed him, one hand on the wall to steady herself.</p><p>“Have you been drinking?” he asked, hot breath on her ear.</p><p>She laughed, relaxing further into his stable grasp. “Maker, no, it’s just this stupid boat. Floor keeps moving out from under me.”</p><p>“Hmm.” His thumbs traced circles over her ribs, and with each movement of the boat he pressed closer against her. “Then I suggest we get you off your feet as soon as possible.”</p><p>It wasn’t their best sex. Through no fault of his own, Fenris simply wasn’t as loud, as powerful, or as vast as the sea, and the competing rhythms had Hawke a little disoriented. A little dizzy. It didn’t help that they almost fell off their berth more than once. The real miracle was that he’d wanted to sleep with her at all after all of this. Or during all of this, as it were.</p><p>It was good, though. The two of them together were good. So good. The ability to make love, to be in love at all, it had been hard won over the course of years, and Hawke had no desire to relinquish it. They were better together than apart.  </p><p>“I want to—” she started before she thought better of it. Fenris tensed beside her, the tightening of his shoulder under her hand. “No, I don’t. I want to want to, but I don’t want to. If that counts for anything.”</p><p>And Fenris, somehow, despite the odds and her best efforts, understood exactly what she meant, only twice mouthing her sentence over again with a scowl before responding, “There was a time when I… ‘wanted to want to’ reconcile with you.”</p><p>“How long did that last?”</p><p>“A year. Maybe a little longer.”</p><p>The world could look any which way in a year. Green sky, red sky, maybe even a blue sky if they got lucky. She might feel differently with a blue sky if she thought it would stay blue. Marriage might seem like an altogether different beast under a blue sky. “And yet it was three years before you did reconcile with me.”</p><p>Fenris chuckled, pulling her a little closer. “I spent at least a year simply wanting to and doing nothing about it.”</p><p>“Your patience could win wars.’’</p><p>He pressed a kiss just below her ear. “I’m out of practice.”</p><p>It wasn’t forgiveness exactly, the press of his body against hers, the ease with which it all started again. It was understanding. Acknowledgement. Maybe there wasn’t anything to forgive. For a moment, with Fenris’s teeth at her throat, his hand between her legs and her head thrown back, Hawke could almost believe that.</p><p>But it was only a moment.</p><p>“All the women in my life are widows,” she blurted out some time later, realizing that it wasn’t true even as she said it. It felt true. In her mind, she amended it to, <em>only the ones who have been married.</em> And to herself she retorted, <em>that’s sort of a prerequisite. </em>But there they were, her mother, Aveline, now Bethany… even Lady Elegant come to think of it.</p><p>After a time, Fenris responded, “I don’t think you should be allowed to count Isabela.” So he had forgotten Merrill as well.</p><p>“Why not?” He rolled his eyes, response enough, and she rested her chin on his chest. “Just because widowhood suits her so well? Zevran is the one who took her husband, and it’s not like you got along all that well with him. He could still kill you.”</p><p>“He could not.” His eyes fell shut, and Hawke supposed that was the last word on that. She watched his brow furrow and crinkle in consternation. Even silent, Hawke vexed him, and eventually and he murmured, “I didn’t take you for superstitious.”</p><p>“I’m not.”</p><p>“You think that a priest binding our lives together will cause my untimely demise.”</p><p>Well, when he put it that way, the whole thing sounded idiotic. As if priests controlled anything at all other than the length of boring services. And she had never even allowed them to have that amount of power over her life. If a service was too long, she left. Most of the time she simply never arrived in the first place and solved that problem straight out the gate.</p><p>Fenris opened one eye to peer at her. While she could think herself in circles regarding this or any other issue, it didn’t change the fact that the subject of marriage tied her stomach in knots. Not to mention the idea of binding Fenris to anything was a bad one, even if that thing was her. Best to change the subject then. “I really don’t want to go back to Kirkwall.”</p><p>“I know.”</p><p>“I don’t want to want to go back, either. I just don’t to go.”</p><p>“I know.”</p><p>“How are you so indifferent to it?”</p><p>He smiled. “I keep thinking about our bed.” As if to emphasize his point, he readjusted himself on their horrible berth, dragging Hawke with him.</p><p>“Maker’s breath, it was a <em>good </em>bed.” He hummed in agreement. “We slept really well in that bed.”</p><p>“I remember.”</p><p>They did not sleep that well on the boat, though that could mostly be attributed to Bethany throwing open the door at some still-dark hour, her worried face illuminated by the magelight in her hand.</p><p>“We have to move faster,” Bethany urged with shaky breaths, “There’s something wrong.” Hawke blinked herself to wakefulness, pushing onto her elbows as Bethany rambled on. “He’s confused, he’s forgetting things, he… he doesn’t know where he is. He saw me and he couldn’t… he couldn’t remember…” Hawke pulled herself out of bed, leaving Fenris behind to sigh and grumble and steal her pillow. She escorted Bethany back to her own room.</p><p>“Unless you can put more wind in the sails using magic, I don’t know how to urge a boat faster. We should be there tomorrow, I think.”  </p><p>“Kirkwall?” Bethany asked through shaky breaths, “We’re going to Kirkwall?” More tears rolled down her cheeks as she grappled with that. “This is my fault,” she said, “If I hadn’t wasted so much time… slept for all that time, or just paid better attention, I might have… I could have figured it out sooner…”</p><p>Hawke put a gentle hand on her arm. “For all you know, sleeping all day and dreaming of him is <em>how </em>you were able to put it together.” And perhaps it was the sleepiness that stayed her tongue in adding, <em>with a dose of rather mandatory wakefulness, you’re welcome. </em></p><p>Bethany scoffed, pulling away. “You don’t even believe me. You think he’s dead.”  </p><p>“I want you to be right,” she said quietly. She did. Bethany was smart and skilled and understood the Fade better than Hawke ever would. It would be nice to believe her and feel something like hope again. Go on a quest that wasn’t entirely doomed from the start. But Hawke simply couldn’t imagine anything <em>living </em>in that place. Not the way people lived here. Not for as long as he’d been gone. “When it comes down to it, what I believe doesn’t matter. Either he’s alive or he’s dead, but we’re going to the Fade to find him regardless. So get some sleep because we need you at your best. I’m not losing you to a demon.”</p><p>She left Bethany there, but didn’t return to Fenris. Instead she stumbled across the deck, bracing herself along the side and watching and the silhouette of Kirkwall looming ever closer on the horizon. She tried to swallow down her dread as she considered which she would rather face again, Kirkwall or the Fade, but it didn’t matter. She had to do both in that order.  </p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0021"><h2>21. Fenris</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Fenris didn’t share Hawke’s dread about returning to Kirkwall. In fact, though he would never admit it to her, he was glad to be on familiar ground. This city had meant something to him. True, he’d taken the best part of it with him when he fled, but by appearances the locals hadn’t torn down the statue of Hawke in the harbor, and he could appreciate that. He liked that statue. He’d eaten many a breakfast in its shadow.</p>
<p>Their companions likewise showed no signs of apprehension. Isabela had been back numerous times and was more concerned about placating her crew while she joined them on this mission that held no promise of loot, and Bethany paced like a caged animal, her thoughts only of the Fade and its denizens.</p>
<p>Hawke, meanwhile, twirled the pale end of her braid with one hand and twirled a blade in the other. Before Fenris realized what she was doing, she took the blade to her hair, hacking off the last bit of white that she’d kept in their long absence from Kirkwall. As her now only-black hair fell free around her face, she tossed the end of the braid into the harbor.</p>
<p>“That should help,” she muttered to no one.</p>
<p>So. She was doing well.</p>
<p>He pulled her aside, gently, and she thrust something into his arms—fabric of some sort. “What do you think the people will do when they’ve realized you’ve returned?” he asked her.</p>
<p>“Nothing. I’ve changed my hair, I’m not wearing the armor, so no one will even know I’m back.” She walked as she spoke, pacing the deck. “If you put that cloak on and hide <em>your </em>lovely white hair and memorable skin, we’ll be completely invisible.” He put on the cloak as she instructed, if only to decrease her mounting anxiety.  “We’ll take the Darktown path to the estate,” she continued, “And we won’t even light any candles or the fireplace, no smoke out the chimney, keep it dark, and no one will ever know we were here.”</p>
<p>This wouldn’t work, but he didn’t need to be the one to tell her that. Hawke did not appear to appreciate how striking her features were, how her beauty stood out regardless of the color of her hair or how many buckles adorned her armor. Add in that Isabela’s boat was undoubtedly recognized and a cloak was unlikely to completely hide Fenris, and it was completely unsurprising that the moment Hawke’s foot hit the dock, someone outside of their little party called her name.</p>
<p>“Hawke? Champion Hawke?”</p>
<p>The four of them turned their heads to the small, ginger dock worker currently gawping at her. “It really is you, the Champion. You’re back!”</p>
<p>Fenris waited to see how she would respond to this, and even Hawke had to agree there was no point in denying it. “Is that little Rudy?” she asked with a swallow and a forced smile, “Maker, are you a dock worker now? Well don’t let these men bully you. Let me know if anyone gives you any trouble. I’ll kick them straight into the harbor.”</p>
<p>“Yes, serrah,” he replied breathlessly. “Does that mean you’re going to stay?”  </p>
<p>Hawke gave a gesture that really could have meant anything at all. Certainly it did not fit the body language of any culture Fenris had encountered. Her head wobbled back and forth, and she finished it by ducking down conspiratorially, saying, “Please, don’t tell anyone I’m here. I’m not trying to cause a stir this time.”</p>
<p>“Mum’s the word, Champion,” he assured her before scurrying away. Bethany made a little sound that conveyed <em>exactly </em>how annoyed she was before striding on ahead, but Hawke turned to Isabela.</p>
<p>“Do you suppose we could find another cloak somewhere on your ship?”</p>
<p>Fenris tried to hold back his laughter.</p>
<p>The cloak, much like her changed hair and armor, didn’t matter. No sooner had Hawke left the dock then a woman dropped her basket of clothes, spilling them all over the ground, her mouth wide open in surprise. “You’ve returned?”</p>
<p>“Oh, Ernestina,” Hawke said, stooping to help her, “How has the laundry business been?”</p>
<p>“Same as ever, Champion, and it’s good to see you. Welcome home.”</p>
<p>Attention always garnered more attention. Like moths to a flame, the denizens of Lowtown came out to find the Champion had returned to them. A fish seller abandoned his stall to run to Hawke, a dead fish still in one hand as he used the other to shake Hawke’s while Fenris covered his nose.</p>
<p>“Harry,” she greeted him warmly.  </p>
<p>“Andraste bless us, are you staying?” he asked, and that did seem to be the question everyone had. “You belong here, you know.”</p>
<p>With one hand, Hawke gripped Fenris’s arm steering him onward, and with the other, she waved at everyone who greeted her. “Manny, Denny,” Hawke called out, her voice taking on a genuine warmth, “Maker, you must have each grown a foot since I left. Louis! Have you learned to play that horn yet? Give your mother my apologies for encouraging you, but I do hope to hear your progress.”</p>
<p>“Does that mean you’re staying?”</p>
<p>She laughed—tittered, really, like a noble caught in a lie—and wiggled her fingers in another useless gesture. They had an entire crowd escorting them, and the plan of cutting through Darktown was abandoned as they were herded toward the large stairs that led to Hightown. Bethany had completely disappeared, and Isabela was accepting small tokens from vendors who came with offerings for the returned Champion. Already she had a covered basket with steam coming out of the top, and she was inspecting a carton of dried fruit.</p>
<p>Fenris removed his cloak as Hawke’s mood shifted to something altogether happier if completely confused.</p>
<p>“Glad to see you, Hank. And Stanley! You look wonderful, send my love to your wife.” Isabela intercepted another offering—sticky buns—placing them happily in her new basket while Hawke whispered to Fenri, “Am I mistaken in understanding that everyone seems pleased to see me?”</p>
<p>“At least here in Lowtown,” he hedged. He glared at Isabela, a strawberry in her mouth, and she shrugged.</p>
<p>“Do you think she has any food in the estate?” she asked. </p>
<p>Probably not. And it seemed unlikely that Hightown would give them as warm a welcome. Then again, with no Viscount, no Grand Cleric, and no Knight-Commander, Hawke could emerge as the most popular public figure in Kirkwall. Fenris grabbed a sticky bun from Isabela’s basket and shoved it into his mouth as he considered this absurd turn of events.  </p>
<p>Everyone seemed to have the same question—was this permanent? Was Hawke staying? At the staircase that divided Hightown and Lowtown, Hawke turned to give a little speech.</p>
<p>“I left Kirkwall for my safety and for yours,” she called to the crowd. “I’ll admit, I wasn’t certain if I’d come back to familiar streets of this city. It’s all been a bit of a haze since—”</p>
<p>“We’ve all seen the sky,” someone cried out.</p>
<p>“Yes, a rather literal haze, I suppose,” she laughed before swallowing. “I have met with the Inquisitor, and thank our lucky stars because I believe the Inquisition has the situation well in <em>hand</em>.”</p>
<p>Fenris groaned internally and prepared himself for whatever declaration would end this impromptu speech.</p>
<p>“Now that I’m back”—and there it was, a vague statement that <em>sounded </em>like they were there permanently— “I can see that Kirkwall tomorrow will be even brighter than the good old days.”</p>
<p>This was met with cheers and Hawke flashed one of her brightest smiles before ducking out of sight.</p>
<p>About halfway up the stairs, her admirers behind them, Hawke grabbed Fenris’s arm once more. “Did I say anything along the lines of exclaiming, ‘I’ll never go away again’ or ‘I’m staying?’”</p>
<p>“No.”</p>
<p>She slumped. “Oh, thank Andraste. Can’t think of what came over me.”</p>
<p>Fenris had a few ideas, but they were best left for after they had gone to the Fade.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>This chapter references a specific movie from the sixties, I don't really expect anyone to get the reference, but if it rings any bells for you, let me know.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0022"><h2>22. Bethany</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Bethany arrived at the estate alone. Hightown seemed less bright, less intimidating then when she was a refugee apostate slinking around its shadows. She’d never been inside the estate before, but the red crest in the front made it as obvious as anything. She shouldn’t have been surprised to find the door unlocked. Keeping an abandoned estate secure would have been far too sensible for Lea.</p><p>If Bethany weren’t minutes away from entering the Fade and finding Alistair, she might have been more curious about her mother’s girlhood home. She might have called home had things not gone differently. She’d spent enough time resenting her sister over it. As it was, the only thing that caught her notice on entering was a large portrait on the wall of Porthos, Lea’s old mabari, looking neither menacing nor very friendly.</p><p>It was a very Fereldan way of greeting people. Alistair would have approved.</p><p>She pushed on into the living room and walked straight into Merrill.</p><p>“Oh,” Merrill exclaimed, and then, “Oh,” as her face fell in pity. Bethany was in no mood for pity on the day they were saving Alistair’s life, and she set her jaw as Merrill gave her a hug.</p><p>“I’m so glad you came to the estate. I didn’t think to send word that I was already here. I moved the mirror yesterday. It’s in one of the side rooms that Hawke never used.”</p><p>Although every sentence was a statement, somehow Merrill made them all sound like questions, and Bethany had no idea what she was talking about.</p><p>“I just thought,” Merrill continued, “My home doesn’t have enough room for <em>all </em>the Hawkes, especially if we’re going to get another one. And, well, I’m not saying this <em>will </em>happen, but if any demons were to come through the mirror, I’d rather they escape into Hightown than the alienage.”</p><p>She led her to the mirror, complete and uncracked now, still showing no reflection. Bethany hadn’t seen the thing in ten years and tried to dredge up her memories regarding it. Cursed, they all had said. It was cursed. “I thought you said this was for long distance communication.”</p><p>“Yes, I did think that at the time, but it’s more like a door? A door that leads to more doors.”  </p><p>Alistair was behind one of those doors.</p><p>“Open it,” she demanded.</p><p>But Merrill refused. Bethany could not convince her to let her through before Hawke arrived, like she needed her <em>permission </em>to save her husband. Just as she was about to leave the estate and find her stupid, dawdling sister, they all showed up, and of course they each had to hug Merrill one by one while exclaiming their surprise that the mansion still contained things like furniture and wall hangings.</p><p>“Can we get on with it?” she asked as Lea marveled at the suspicious lack of dust.</p><p>“There’s just one thing,” Lea said as Merrill raised her hand to unlock the mirror, “About the spiders in the Fade.”</p><p>Everyone stared at her as she failed to describe that one thing, her mouth opening and shutting uselessly. Bethany snapped, “Out with it.”</p><p>Lea ran a hand through her hair, eyeing Fenris. “They’re not really spiders.”</p><p>“Andraste’s flaming knickers, I think we could all figure that one out.”</p><p>And with that, Bethany strode through the mirror.</p><p>Like Merrill said, she found herself in a place with many other mirrors. Doors to elsewhere. The Veil felt strange, uncomfortable, like it was shaken loose, prickling on her skin. Closer, then, to wherever he was.</p><p>Merrill led them all to another mirror. “I haven’t tried them all yet, but this one should get you closer. At least, I’m fairly certain it’s the Fade.”</p><p>“You know,” Lea said as they approached the overly tall mirror in a sea of broken glass, “Very famously and just recently, a magister tore a hole in the sky trying to get into the Fade. Imagine if he’d known he could have just walked through a mirror or two. And that one was located in Kirkwall.”</p><p>Whatever was said next, Bethany did not hear because she had already walked through to the other side.</p><p>It looked familiar, all rocks and haze and green, so much green. The Black City, much closer than she would care for it to be. No Alistair, but that was to be expected. She couldn’t expect the mirror to dump her into his lap.</p><p>Her arrival did not go unnoticed.</p><p>Lea spoke of spiders, but her sister was a liar. What she meant was fear, little fears on many little legs, and spiders weren’t the half of it. The others arrived to a fight already in progress as Bethany aimed her magic at templars, drowning, the Blight itself, and other things too terrible to name. Concepts given physical form that wanted nothing more than to choke her in her own fear. Alistair dead, Alistair dying, Alistair overcome with the taint as it turned his skin blue. It took everything she had to calm her racing heart.</p><p>“Spiders?” Fenris asked when it was all over.</p><p>Lea, covered in the guts of demons, shrugged.</p><p>Nobody asked what the others had seen. Felt. Feared.</p><p>And now that the demons were dealt with—for now anyway—Bethany could feel something else. Something that shouldn’t be in the Fade at all.  “I can sense him,” she whispered, peering into the distance.  </p><p>“What?” Lea asked. “That’s not a thing”—she glanced warily at Fenris—”That’s not like a true-love-Fade thing, is it? You can’t just sense people.”</p><p>“It’s a Warden thing, you idiot. We can sense each other.”</p><p>“Oh.”</p><p>Merrill stayed behind to guard the mirror. She handed Lea a ball of twine and held onto the other end.</p><p>“I’d prefer not to send up sparks and attract every demon in the area here,” she said, “But if string goes slack for too long, I will.”</p><p>Not the most effective system, but there weren’t exactly landmarks to bring them back here. Every direction looked more or less the same—wisps, demons, rocks, green. And it all moved, floating or slithering or sliding, and yet completely dead. Nothing here was truly alive. It wasn’t a place for living.</p><p><em>This is where he’s been all this time</em>, she thought.</p><p>“Beth!”</p><p>It was like a lightning bolt from the top of her head to the flats of her feet. The cry reverberated off the rocky landscape and echoed back to the figure stepping out of the shadow of a rock formation. He waved at them, and even from here she recognized Alistair’s broad shoulders, his gait as he approached. She tried to breathe. She tried to swallow down the lump in her throat.</p><p>“Maker’s breath,” he called, “Is that really you?”</p><p>It was the first time she heard his real voice in months. Warm and happy and <em>alive</em>, so different from everything else in this place.  </p><p>“Yes.” Her reply was almost a whisper. But she knew as Lea shouted back for them all that it wasn’t really him. Just an imitation ready to tempt her. Her feet wouldn’t move, so she waited as the demon wearing Alistair’s face approached. He looked happy.</p><p><em>This won’t be the last time I see that face</em>, she told herself as she raised her staff. <em>It won’t.</em> She twirled it once and burnt him with a flame so hot he didn’t have time to scream.</p><p>“<em>Bethany</em>,” Lea hissed, as if that would do anything at all. He was already ash. Had he been real, his armor and bones would have survived the blaze, but all he was was a pile of smoldering nothing.  </p><p>Bethany sniffed and squeezed her eyes shut.</p><p>“That was a demon,” she explained, “Envy, I think.”</p><p>In the following silence, someone’s hand settled on her shoulder, and she tried to shrug it off until she realized it was Isabela. “Next time, sweet thing, one of us can handle it.”</p><p>“A demon like that wouldn’t get too far from its prey,” Lea said. “We must be almost there.”</p><p>Bethany nodded. It was only more confirmation that he was really here. Close.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0023"><h2>23. Hawke</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>They killed five Alistair look-alikes before finding the real thing. Not to mention all of the… spiders… that found them. Hawke could hardly stand to think of what Fenris was seeing. Feeling. She was trying to keep her own eyes closed for as much of the fighting as she could, her back pressed to Isabela’s. It wasn’t working. She hated feeling the need to apologize before stabbing. She only realized she was doing it out loud when Fenris put a hand on her shoulder.</p><p>Then Bethany spotted him, the <em>real </em>him she said, though Hawke couldn’t make out anything. Warden sense, she supposed, though if the demons could mimic sounds and sights and smells from the real world, couldn’t they impersonate that? Bethany ran ahead toward an outcropping of rocks that looked the same as any others and threw her arms around what must have been a person, but Hawke’s focus was back on the flaming spiders that seemed to have no end.</p><p>When they caught up to her, Bethany was sobbing with her arms around a weird-looking boulder, and Hawke steeled herself to see what state his remains were in. Couldn’t be worse than the spiders, really. But no, that was no boulder, Maker’s Breath, that was a <em>person</em>, a person who was being swallowed whole by the green glowing stone of this realm. Alistair was mumbling to himself, eyes open and staring at nothing, his arms and legs completely embedded in the Fade.</p><p>He didn’t seem to notice them.</p><p>Bethany was all muffled tears as she clung to the wretched man, and she’d be completely useless for the next half hour at least, not that Hawke blamed her. But could this pitiable creature truly be Alistair? He lifted his head—and <em>how </em>could he even be alive?— and his dark golden eyes landed on Hawke.</p><p>“I know you,” he croaked as Bethany sobbed into his neck.</p><p>“Of course you do, little brother,” she replied, quite helpless to do much of anything else. She could feel the surprise and skepticism and horror radiating off of Fenris next to her, but Bethany was right, Alistair was alive, and here, and they had to get him out.  </p><p>“No,” he groaned, “That’s not right. That’s not…”</p><p>His head dropped, and he returned to incoherent mumbling.</p><p>“We’re clear for now,” Isabela said, jogging up to them. Her eyes landed on Alistair. “Oh sweet Maker, tell me that’s another demon.”</p><p>“Fenris, can you get him out?” Hawke whispered, the words sticking in her throat.</p><p>His brows were furrowed darkly over his eyes, but he activated the lyrium markings. “We shall see.” To Alistair he murmured, “My apologies,” before plunging his hands into the rock and pulling out Alistair’s arm. The man screamed, weak as he was, and Hawke thought she heard a snap of bone.</p><p>“Fen—”</p><p>“I know.”</p><p>On his next attempt he plunged deeper, trying to pull Alistair out all at once. “I don’t remember this,” Alistair groaned.</p><p>“And if we’re lucky, you never will,” Hawke replied lightly. Fenris should have had him out by now the way he was glowing. Maybe Fade rock wasn’t like walls and tables and people, and if he messed this up, they’d both be stuck in this blasted nightmare forever. But he didn’t mess up, and they both became dislodged at once, landing on the ground with twin thumps and accompanying groans. Bethany rushed to heal Alistair as Hawke pulled Fenris to his feet.</p><p>“It’s okay, Ali,” Bethany soothed, blue magic covering him as he writhed in pain, “You’re going to be okay.”</p><p>“There’s no way he can walk,” Hawke murmured. How long had he been stuck like that? It would be a miracle if he could move at all on purpose. No longer the beefy Warden she’d come here with, all smiles and good cheer and stories about Bethany, he looked weak, frail, his sunken skin reflecting the greenish hue of the Fade. Completely delirious as he continued to mumble to himself. “I’ll carry him,” she said softly to Bethany.</p><p>He was lighter than she would have liked. Of course he was, what had he eaten since she left him here? Maker, what was keeping him alive? Would he crumble to dust when they dragged him through the mirror? She tried not to think of this as Fenris helped her drape his limbs over her shoulders.</p><p>“I don’t understand,” Alistair mumbled.</p><p>“That’s fine, little brother. I’m sure everything will make more sense with food in your belly. A good night’s sleep.” And three years’ time to fully and thoroughly forget this place.</p><p>Bethany cupped his face in her hand. “We’re going to get you out of here, Ali. It’s going to be okay.”</p><p>Rich words from a woman whose eyes were rimmed red with all the crying she had just gotten done. Alistair had no response to that.</p><p>Isabela took up the ball of twine, still taut, so hopefully Merrill was just fine by the mirror, and Fenris took up the rear. They’d cut a swath out of the demons between here and there, but Hawke could see it just like the ocean, filling in like they’d never been there at all.</p><p>“You’re not… You’re not her,” Alistair said. Hawke couldn’t really protest that. She wasn’t most people in the world. “I’m not your… You found me in a cave.”</p><p>“Yes,” she replied, a mite distracted by the demons attacking Fenris. No hearts to rip out there, though he did try. “In Crestwood.”</p><p>“Crestwood,” he mumbled.</p><p>Fenris had a handle on it. She shifted her hand to be closer to one of her throwing knives. She might be able to serve as a distraction if nothing else.  “And Bethany is here, Alistair. Just there.”</p><p>“Beth… I was talking to someone named Beth.”</p><p>“Yes, that’s her. Your wife, Alistair. My sister.”</p><p>“’m not your brother.”</p><p>“Oh, don’t be ridiculous,” she said, “Even if you weren’t my brother by law, this little experience would certainly forge the bonds of family between us. Nobody gets to be this scared for this long in the company of others and not bear some deep connection to them.” Talking felt good. She preferred the sound of her own voice to the squelch of boots and constant dripping and the odd, incessant pressure on her head. She’d volunteered to carry him because it made sense, but his weight on her back was actually a bit of a comfort somehow. “And you’re the only brother I’ve got these days, so no bowing out just yet.”</p><p>Isabela kept leading them with the twine, but the landscape around them looked wholly unfamiliar. Some of the rock formations almost looked like the old trees in the forests back home, but eerily quiet, and Hawke would have remembered seeing this crumbling building the first time around, she knew it. Fenris gave her a concerned look as well, but she reminded herself this was why they had the twine. Twine was real and this place was a trap.</p><p>“Beth.”</p><p>Hawke swiveled her head to see yet another Alistair approaching from the front, more haggard than the others, though not nearly as pitiful as the one on her back. The way he looked at Bethany—could a demon fake that? Hawke shifted uncomfortably, wondering for a moment if they had the false one. This new one looked real, more real than anything else around them.</p><p><em>People can’t move that fast,</em> she thought, blinking her doubts away and tightening her grip on the real Alistair as this new one wrapped his arms around Bethany. But Bethany wasn’t reacting to the demon, or at least, she wasn’t fighting him. “My little storm cloud,” he said, and this was bad. Hawke’s hands were full, and they couldn’t afford for Bethany to crack now. Fenris was equally useless, frowning at the new interloper who was whispering in Bethany’s ear.</p><p>“He’s a demon,” Hawke said, but Fenris didn’t appear to hear or understand her.</p><p>Bethany began to cry.</p><p>She couldn’t risk throwing her knife with Bethany that close to him. Not without dropping Alistair, anyway.</p><p>“Say something, Alistair,” Hawke hissed, “Snap her out of it.”</p><p>“Are we in Ostagar?” he asked, and Maker, she had never been more annoyed with someone in her life. <em>Useless. </em>She whipped her knife to clatter at Isabela’s feet, and after an indignant glare at Hawke, Isabela blinked at the real Alistair. “Oh, shit,” she mouthed and snapped into action.</p><p>“Close your eyes, kitten,” she shouted. The point of her dagger bloomed out the front of the demon’s chest, and Isabela pulled him back, away from Bethany, dislodging her blade and slamming him to the ground.  </p><p>“I took the best of him,” the Alistair-demon slurred, his smile still apparent as he oozed into an amorphous putty. “He dies with me.”</p><p>A small yet powerful fireball ended its suffering, if demons could truly suffer. Bethany stood there shaking.</p><p>“We have the right one,” Hawke asserted to the group, mentally trying to convince herself. The others were free, walking around, lucid. Fake. This man on her back—frankly if he was a demon, it deserved to be gently nursed back to health for the state it was in. But no, it was Alistair. It had to be. “Bethany,” she commanded, “Look at me. We have the right one, and we need to get him out of here.”</p><p>Hawke was beginning to tire.</p><p>Fenris’s mood went from concerned to downright sour, but at least Isabela seemed unfazed by her momentary hoodwinking. Bethany was now trudging along like this expedition hadn’t been a miraculous success, like it wasn’t unfathomable that they were dragging her living, breathing husband out of here. After half an hour of silent walking, she rubbed her face and said, “I just need… I just need to sit down.”</p><p>Without waiting for an answer, Bethany plopped herself onto the ground and buried her face in her hands.</p><p>“How much farther?” Hawke asked Isabela. “How large is the ball of twine?”</p><p>Isabela grimaced. “I didn’t want to say anything, but I swear it looks bigger than when we started.”</p><p>Hawke stared at the twine, and somehow she was right. <em>Fuck</em>. <em>Fuck this place forever. </em>She pulled out a stamina draught and chugged it. Maker, she knew Alistair was already smaller than he had any right to be, all that muscle just poof, gone, eaten by the Fade, but every minute he seemed to grow a little heavier. She hitched him farther up her back, and he groaned.</p><p>“Right. Listen. We can’t stay here. Take a potion, throw water on your face, whatever you need to do to buck up, but we are leaving.”</p><p>Isabela took a swig of something and started to move, and Fenris had already left in the direction of the twine, but Bethany stayed put.</p><p>“Bethany Hawke, you stand up right now.”</p><p>“There’s no point,” she replied, refusing to look at them. “We were too late.”</p><p>If Hawke’s hands were free, she might have slapped her. “I don’t know what lies these demons have been putting in your head,” she said through gritted teeth, “but if you want to cry about it, you can do it on the other side of that fucking mirror. Get up.”</p><p>Bethany slowly, achingly, got to her feet, still pointedly refusing to look at Hawke and Alistair. “For all we know, it’s not even him. Just another trick.”</p><p>“Then we cry about our misfortune later,” Hawke snapped. “Move.”</p><p>Nobody was getting left behind this time. Hawke would be sure of it.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Note-- I have a bunch of siblings, and we do not call each other little bro or sis or whatever. Hawke does this with Alistair originally to annoy him (he is, in fact, quite large), but he actually liked it a lot so she kept doing it.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0024"><h2>24. Alistair</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Everything hurt. Maker, it hurt. His arms, his legs. He’d forgotten about them, somehow. Limbs. He’d had them at one point in time, and now he had them again, which he only knew because every joint was throbbing pain, from his knuckles to his elbows to his hips.</p><p>Breathing hurt. He was uncomfortably aware of how his chest expanded, held, then collapsed as the air was expelled from his chapped lips. Never had to think so hard about it before. Never wanted to again.</p><p>The world was too bright and too dark by turns, and he couldn’t understand what anyone was saying. The words were muffled and they wrapped around and reordered themselves in his head. Gibberish. And through the pain—knees, toes, Maker, his toes hurt—he had no wherewithal to try to translate it. If it was important… they could talk to someone else.</p><p>One voice cut through the rest, though—a nice voice, soft—and for a moment he remembered language.</p><p>“Ali, you need to eat.”</p><p>No, he really didn’t. Couldn’t remember the last time… he couldn’t remember. Didn’t have a body to feed, did he? No stomach for it.</p><p>If he could talk, he would have tried that joke.</p><p>“Swallow.”                                               </p><p>Didn’t want to, but didn’t have much of a choice with a hand on his face.</p><p><em>Don’t remember this, </em>he thought over and over as he was spoon fed broth. <em>This never happened</em>.</p><p>“It’s happening now,” came a cheerful, lilting voice.</p><p>And after days of this, and they <em>were </em>days, because days changed in a pattern of lights and darkness that he’d somehow forgotten, Alistair had to come to the mystifying conclusion that he was alive.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0025"><h2>25. Bethany</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Bethany was not proud of how their trip to the Fade ended. She’d been a Warden for years and spent her entire life besides fighting off demons in her sleep, and only with Lea’s very loud and insistent prodding had she escaped that place without giving in to her worst impulses.</p><p>She would have died had she gone alone.</p><p>Alistair would have died.</p><p>This was what she thought about as she cleaned him up back in Kirkwall. The moment they left the Fade he ceased his mumbling and lost consciousness. Only then had Lea panicked, but Bethany was overcome realizing she would have left him behind, believing him another imposter. Fenris ended up carrying him the rest of the way.</p><p>He’d been asleep since then. His chest rose and fell, his face twitched with emotions passing by like quickly moving shadows, and Alistair lived. Bethany had him back.</p><p>She could run her fingers through his hair until his face eased of all tension. She could press as many kisses to his forehead or his nose as she wanted. She could almost start allowing herself to imagine a day after this day and another one after that.</p><p>Almost.</p><p>It only took one day in the Fade for Bethany to lose hope. To resign herself to her fate and her bitterness. All her fears finding her again and again, Alistairs dying everywhere around her, the sound of her sister apologizing over and over as she hacked and slashed at the demons. How had Alistair survived months of this?</p><p>What was he going to be like when he woke up?</p><p>Bethany had a suspicion.</p><p>She tried not to think about it as she and Merrill cared for him. Wet a cloth and wiped the Fade off of him. Healed the wound at his side that somehow never closed or festered in all his time away. Abrasions from the rocks that had climbed up his limbs. Shaved his beard. Washed and cut his hair. Cradled his head while spooning him broth. Cleaned him up when his body rejected it. Spent hours trying again and again to get him to hold anything down.</p><p>He was so weak.</p><p>Bethany almost laughed when he tried to fight the spoon away. Never had she so easily defeated him in unarmed combat. “Eat a little and you’ll have a better chance of winning,” she told him. It seemed to work, because he gave up the fight. “If you keep this down, I’ll see about getting Merrill to add some potatoes to the next batch. If you’re really good, I’ll find you a soft cheese.”</p><p>She was certain he tried his best.</p><p>But whenever he opened his eyes, there didn’t seem to be any recognition there. He wasn’t really awake, she knew that, but his gaze traveled right over her like she was just a piece of furniture in his room. Some stranger come to press magic into his body and force him to eat.</p><p>“Alistair?” she asked him whenever he stirred, more than anything wanting to hear his voice, his thoughts. Maker, a joke, something.</p><p>The most she got in reply was incoherent mumbling. More often silence as his eyes fell closed again.</p><p>The demon claimed he’d taken the best of him, but Bethany knew for a fact that Alistair’s big heart was still steadily beating in his chest. It was what he’d whispered in her ear in Alistair’s voice that made her blood run cold. <em>You’d be better off staying with me, love. I know you inside and out, and that’s more than I can say for that wretch</em>.</p><p>Oh, but it was tempting in that moment. He felt real, he felt <em>right, </em>familiar and beautiful and whole. When he looked at her, she saw Alistair. She felt loved. She wanted that love.  </p><p>She’d thought it envy, but maybe it was desire. Greed, avarice. Or maybe she was just weak. In that moment she <em>wanted </em>so badly she could hardly stand it. To give in, to be held, to stop fighting and rest. Then Isabela’s dagger broke his body and the spell and Bethany felt <em>empty</em>. Hopeless.</p><p>She just couldn’t kick that nagging feeling that something was wrong. That the demon <em>had </em>taken something, something irreplaceable.</p><p>Her suspicions were confirmed when Alistair roused himself enough to recognize Isabela. All three women in the room turned to him when said her name. Eyes on Isabela, he then asked, “Is Darrian here? Zevran?”</p><p>“Not today, sweet thing. We can send for them if you like.”</p><p>“Did we… is it over?”</p><p>Isabela looked at Bethany and shrugged. “Yes. You were splendid.”</p><p>He dozed off again without responding, and Merrill was very cheerful about his level of awareness. Might wake up for real any day now, and that would be a treat. Perhaps he could hold his own spoon.</p><p>Bethany didn’t explain to them her sudden bout of crying. She didn’t want to tell them, didn’t want to put words to it. Just silently let Isabela hug her as her fears won out again.</p><p>She was certain Alistair no longer knew who she was.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0026"><h2>26. Fenris</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Very brief alcohol mention in this one.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Fenris was standing in front of the decrepit mansion he had never intended to enter again when his own stupidity hit him so hard he almost started laughing.</p><p>After dumping Alistair on a bed, he had walked straight out of the estate and into the darkness of Kirkwall. No insects or birds or moon in the sky, but Fenris could feel it was closer to dawn than dusk as he walked on already aching feet.</p><p>Fenris was angry.</p><p>He had known going into a realm of pure magic would set his teeth on edge. He had not known just how easily the demons would plumb the depths of his mind and betray his own thoughts to him. He had not thought to be confronted with every horror and iniquity he had ever witnessed.  When he had determined to control his future, he had carefully locked away that past. For the Fade to splay it out for him like he was no more than a toy to be played with…</p><p>But that was a fear, too. And the entire fucking point.</p><p>How fitting that in his agitated wandering he found himself in front of the old mansion. He could haunt it in his rage once again, a wounded animal with his leash only just broken, lashing out at anyone who extended a hand.</p><p>Or he could turn around and go home.</p><p>Hawke waited for him. Isabela, too. Bethany, who he still hoped to call sister, and the astonishingly alive Alistair, who would then be brother. And, he supposed, Merrill.</p><p>It wasn’t exactly a difficult decision.</p><p>He found Isabela snoring softly on a sofa before the fire, a bottle in her hand. He removed it and covered her with a blanket. Merrill and Bethany conversed softly in the room where he had left Alistair. Hawke he found in the bath, lathering her skin with a loofa.</p><p>“Can you believe Orana kept my bath dusted?” she asked, “It was spotless. I think she really expected me to return any minute. I feel sorry now for disappointing her for so long.”</p><p>He blinked at her. “She did see us enter the mirror. We were gone for hours.”</p><p>Hawke stared at him, arm outstretched, loofa motionless.</p><p>“So she would have had time to prepare your bath,” he explained further.</p><p>“Oh.” She dropped both hands into the water. The loofa floated up to the surface and bobbed there. “Yes, of course you’re right.”</p><p>He knelt by the side of the tub and reached across it to embrace her, ignoring the awkward angle and the tub between them and the bubbles pressed into the fabric covering his chest.</p><p>She asked quietly, “Are you staying or going?”</p><p>“Staying, Hawke. Always staying.”</p><p>She held him a little tighter, the water now thoroughly soaking his collar. When she pulled back, she rubbed where his armor had dug into her skin. “Then… do you want to join me? Felt good to wash off the… spider guts.”</p><p>Spiders.</p><p>Of course she called them spiders.</p><p>Fenris did not see any spiders, and he had a suspicion that Hawke did not see that many either.</p><p>His feet were cold and his joints ached, and even if neither was true he would have accepted Hawke’s offer. He gratefully sank into the hot water and imagined his old memories were steam, rising and fading away.</p><p>After he was certain there was no green grit between his toes or remnants of demon lingering his hair, he pulled Hawke against his chest and breathed slowly. “How many times did you kill me?”</p><p>“I wasn’t counting,” she lied. Fenris waited. “Four. Four times.”</p><p>“How many times did you kill Varric?”</p><p>“Three.”</p><p>Fenris allowed himself a moment of victory. “I knew you loved me more than him.”</p><p>Hawke shouldered him in response, but there wasn’t any muscle behind it. “How did you know?” she asked.</p><p>“You don’t usually apologize to spiders.” Or squeeze her eyes shut before the killing blow.</p><p>“I’m very polite, I’ll have you know. I am known for my tact and etiquette and <em>stop laughing.”</em></p><p>He did not. An hour ago, laughter was unthinkable, so he let himself chuckle freely next to her ear while she squirmed. “You are known and loved for many things, Hawke, but tact is not one of them.”</p><p>“There <em>were </em>spiders,” she insisted, “There were just… other things as well.” Hawke sighed.</p><p>They fell into silence, and just as Fenris was about to suggest abandoning the tub for their bed, Hawke said, “We couldn’t have done it without you. No idea how we would have gotten him out. He would have been stuck there.”</p><p>“You’d have thought of something.”</p><p>“Maybe. Blunt my daggers chiseling him out and end up with him bleeding in half a dozen places. Not ideal. But still, even beside that, I… I’m glad you were there.”</p><p>“I…” He knew what she was getting at. Their argument that never quite ended, never quite resolved. “I cannot say the same. I understand now why you did not want me to come.”</p><p>If she had been more forthright, would he have listened? He’d never said no to a mission before, no matter where she went. But if she had properly warned him, what then? If he had refused to enter the Fade, Alistair would still be stuck in the rock that was eating him alive, Bethany would have stayed behind, and Hawke might have been lost.</p><p>Still…</p><p>“You should have told me what it was like in there. Warned me. Told me what you had been through while we were apart. When I saw you in Jader, after that, I didn’t <em>know</em>.”</p><p>“I didn’t want you to. I didn’t want to think about it ever again. Not even when preparing to go back. Not now, either.”</p><p>He… could appreciate that approach. But it wasn’t good enough.</p><p>“Alistair’s back,” Hawke stated, “I’m sure he has a long recovery ahead of him, but he’s back, and now we never have to talk about it again. Everything can go back to how it was.”</p><p>“No,” Fenris replied, gentler than he felt it, “No, it can’t. Nothing ever goes back to how it was. Hawke, you know this.”</p><p>She was silent for a time, and when she finally spoke, it was while leaving the bath. “It will be easier to think of an uncertain future after a good night’s sleep,” she said without looking at him. When he joined her in bed, she was already asleep.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0027"><h2>27. Alistair</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The shapes around Alistair came into focus slowly. They’d been there for ages, or, well, days more like, but it seemed only now was he registering his surroundings. No longer just shapes, now they were <em>things</em>.</p><p>Stone walls, human-built. Old portraits on the wall of complete strangers, possibly Orlesian by the expressions. Bed was large, fancy. Carved birds on the bed posts. Nice pillow, even if it seemed to be completely indented to his shape. Whole bed was, really, and trying to move only ended with him sucked right back into its grasp. Bit handsy for a bed, and if it were less comfortable he’d hold a grudge. Most importantly, overly bright rays of sun poured in from high windows, so he was above ground, somewhere where the sun shone.</p><p>He could not think of how he got here.</p><p>The woman humming by the fire was familiar, too, though he was certain he didn’t know her from before… whatever brought him here. Wherever here was. He had a sense of green eyes, patient tolerance for him, and a spoon she wielded too freely. Now he clocked that she was Dalish and not a Warden, which didn’t offer many hints about the whole thing. Not Soldier’s Peak, nor Amaranthine, nor Denerim.</p><p>Maker, his head felt muddled. Well, he was in a strange bed in a strange room being taken care of by strangers after sleeping for ages. Not much of a mystery what happened there—he’d gone and done something bloody stupid.</p><p>“Oh, good, you decided to wake up all the way,” the Dalish exclaimed, walking over to him. She took him in with wide, curious eyes, and nodded in satisfaction. “We were all going to be very put out if we went through all the trouble of bringing you back only for your mind to go traveling elsewhere. You are <em>here</em>, aren’t you?”</p><p>Alistair blinked a few times. “I sure hope so.” The words came out in a frightfully froggy mess, so he cleared his throat and tried again. “Yes.”</p><p>“Good. That is reassuring. Do you think you’re well enough to hold your own bowl? Do tell the truth, because I don’t want to have to wash all the linens again for spilt mush. But if you manage to do that <em>and </em>hold the spoon and eat all of it, and keep it down, next time I’ll add a pinch of sugar.”</p><p>A head injury then, had to be. It would explain, well, everything about this situation.</p><p>She propped him up, which didn’t seem right given just how small she was and how easily she was handling him, and she thrust a bowl into his hands. He <em>was </em>hungry. And he’d eaten worse. Much worse. On numerous occasions. Wouldn’t mind the promised sugar, though. This tasted like nothing, really, and yet after a few hurried spoonfuls his stomach made a rather sharp and unexpected turn. He slowed his eating and took a breath.</p><p>His hands didn’t look right.</p><p>He swallowed again, willing his stomach to settle. His shirt looked wrong, too. Something about the sleeves. He couldn’t quite put his finger on it, the way the spoon looked too big in his hand. No time to solve that mystery, because of all people in the world, Isabela the pirate walked into his room. She glanced at him on her way to plant a kiss on the Dalish and called over her shoulder, “Darrian and Zevran aren’t here,” in a way that made him wonder how many times he’d already asked the question. Head injury for certain, and memory loss to boot. Great. But now that he was on the up and up, he might as well get a handle on things.</p><p>“Where is here?” he asked.</p><p>“Kirkwall.” Isabela looked at him again, up and down, eyes on his hand holding his bowl of porridge. “You’re really awake this time, aren’t you? Well that’s a relief. You’re sleep talking was getting repetitive.”</p><p>“How long have I been not awake?” The spoon in his hand was growing heavy, never mind the bowl, and Alistair knew he wouldn’t be getting that promised sugar next time. He set them both down on the side table as Isabela came to sit next to him.</p><p>“Depends on how you look at it, I suppose. In Kirkwall, it’s been just over a week.”</p><p>Alistair felt like he could probably sleep for a week longer, though maybe not at this moment. He was looking at his hands again. Too thin, he thought. His arms, they were too thin. The sleeves were too large for him. A week couldn’t do this. And yet, just from eating he was too tired to pull his hands closer to really examine them. Maker, his hands…</p><p>“What do you remember of it?” Isabela asked, snapping him out of it. “It was a very dashing rescue on our part.”  </p><p>“Oh, um.” Alistair considered this. He had memories, sort of, all slippery like eels, and much like eels he had no desire to actually hold onto them. Best let them flop on elsewhere. Mostly there was just the feeling. “I thought I was dead. I was certain of it.”</p><p>“You and the rest of the world. Your death was announced. Mainly by Hawke.”</p><p>Hawke. That name rang a bell or six. He could almost see her, tall, armored, spiky. “The Champion,” he muttered. Kirkwall. That all made sense. He’d… he’d had business with her. She’d written him. He felt the details there, if he could reach out and pluck them. But the Dalish looked at his half-full bowl with a raised eyebrow, clucked once in her disappointment, and then left the room with it.</p><p>“Remind me of her name,” he asked Isabela with a lowered voice.</p><p>“That’s Merrill.”</p><p>Merrill. He’d heard that name before, he knew it. “I think I should have known that.”</p><p>“I daresay you should, but no one would blame you for forgetting in your state. The other elf in the house is Fenris, and I don’t think you met him before all this. Oh, and Orana. She’s sweet. Be mean to her and I’ll stab you, invalid or no.”</p><p>“But I can be mean to Fenris and Merrill all I want?” he joked.</p><p>“You could, but I’m not sure there would be much left of you to stab after.”</p><p>He laughed once. “Point taken.”</p><p>It felt good to talk to a person. A familiar face. He felt like he’d been… He’d been talking, but alone. He’d been very alone for a very long time. Isabela covered his wrong hand with one of hers, rough like the sailor she was, and Alistair felt a flood of gratitude for her. But he also felt something else—there had been someone else here taking care of him. Someone whose hand-- </p><p>“The other woman here… the mage, human, the pretty one…” He knew her name. He <em>knew </em>he knew her name, but it just wouldn’t come to him. Right there on the tip of his tongue, like he could just reach out and grab it. Dark, sad eyes and a soft voice.</p><p>“Bethany,” Isabela said sharply, “Alistair, that’s Bethany.”</p><p>“Bethany,” he repeated, leaning back against all his pillows and closing his eyes. Oh, Maker, it felt good to have that riddle solved. A weight lifted right off his chest. “She always looks like… like she wants to cry,” he finished, “Like a little raincloud.”</p><p>There was a noise in the doorway, cracked china as a teapot tumbled to the floor, and Alistair looked up to see her, the pretty one, stormy as ever in the middle of the mess.</p><p>“Bethany,” Isabela called, lunging off the bed.</p><p>But after locking eyes with Alistair, Bethany turned and fled, and Isabela ran after.</p><p>Alistair was left alone with his thoughts, and his thoughts were that that was all a little weird. And that he didn’t like it. He felt bad, actually. Wanted her to come back so he could apologize. With his weak hands and his froggy voice he had… he had disappointed her.</p><p><em>Bethany</em>. The name was like honey in his mouth and electricity in his skin. He’d been talking to… He’d spent a lot of time talking to…</p><p>No one, because he’d been dead, or as close to as he’d ever be. Blast, he just couldn’t remember. Head wound, or whatever happened to him to put him in his current state. He was too tired. He sank deeper into the bed, and then, rather unwillingly, back into a fitful sleep.</p>
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<a name="section0028"><h2>28. Hawke</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>For the ninth night in a row, Hawke had nightmares about what definitely were not spiders and never had been. For the ninth night in a row, she woke up to utter darkness and desperately wanted to shake Fenris awake until he said something all sleepy and grumbly and dispelled the anxious knot in her chest. And for the ninth night in a row she didn’t, because he never slept enough as it was and because she’d probably bothered him enough for a lifetime already.</p><p> She wouldn’t have minded if he happened to have his own simultaneous nightmare, though, and woke up spontaneously. That would have been very handy on his part. Cheering him up might have cheered her up immensely.</p><p>He didn’t, though, and this night Hawke was not content to toss and turn in bed and watch him sleep as she had the previous nights. She lit the candle at her old secretary desk and flipped through the journal that hadn’t moved in the three years since she’d fled for her life.</p><p>It was surreal being back. She’d thought the city would hold a grudge, but apparently Anders and Orsino dead and Meredith turned into a statue was justice served. The Chantry might have blamed Hawke for the mess, but Kirkwall didn’t, somehow. Even Hightown settled around her with only a few grumbles and nervous glances when she said she didn’t know when Varric was coming back, but probably soon. That was a lie, but she enjoyed the furious whispering that followed it.</p><p>Then the letters started showing up. Requests for help. With no Viscount, no templars, no Arishok, no Elthina, and no Hawke, the city was being run by the Carta, the Coterie, and the Dwarven Merchant Guild. Frankly, based on the nature of the pleas for help she received, they were doing a better job of it than the previous administration, and Hawke was happy enough to pass on information to Aveline regarding more persistent criminals. A few requests that did not require stabbing or traveling out to the Wounded Coast she handled herself.</p><p>Fenris accompanied her to fetch a hissing cat out of the large tree in the alienage and to deliver a love letter for a very bashful leatherworker. She doubted his stern countenance helped with the overall ambience of the latter mission, or the former, actually, might have encouraged some of the hissing, really, but he did not complain about their return life as usual in Kirkwall. And afterward she bought them both chocolate covered peanuts.</p><p>Fenris had said things could not go back to how they were, but it all felt very similar. She wasn’t doing it on purpose, she didn’t need to prove a point, but after three years just trying to survive, living rough and tumble hiding all the time, it felt good to have a clarity of purpose. Deliver this, fix that, have a drink, say hello, and return to the same bed she woke up in that morning.</p><p>Perhaps she should make a new entry in this old journal to mark the successful quests on behalf of Kirkwall’s citizens. She’d only ever written in fits and starts, her longest streak lasting three months followed by a three-year silence, and her focus was rarely on the larger issues of the day anyway.</p><p>Like this entry.</p><p>
  <em>Meredith summoned me to the Gallows today. There was a splotch on her little tiara-armor-thing, and I couldn’t keep my eyes off of it. Was it rust? Tarnish? Did a bird poop on her? And if so, did she not feel it? Do none of her underlings feel comfortable enough to tell her that she had bird poop on her templar crown before having a meeting with me? Or do I not give them enough credit, and they let her look like that out of spite? </em>
</p><p>
  <em>Anyway, she wants to use all the good will I’ve developed with apostates over the years by disagreeing with her and generally refusing to imprison them all by… agreeing with her and imprisoning them for her. A truly novel idea from her. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>On the way home, had the most marvelous croissant. I finished it by the time I passed the foundry and turned right back around to buy a dozen a more. </em>
</p><p>The rest of the page was filled with a description of the varieties of croissants she had purchased. Maker, she hoped that bakery survived the past three years. Perhaps she’d visit today. Croissants could truly improve the mood of the household. According to her careful notes here, Fenris’s favorite was the almond one.</p><p>The sun was almost up, so the bakers were already at work. That settled it. Hawke dressed and meandered her way to Lowtown.</p><p>She got lost.</p><p>Impossible.</p><p>She could navigate these streets on a moonless night, blindfolded, and she had. Twice. But as she stared at a wall of slum housing that simply shouldn’t have been there and walked into an alley that ended when it should have dumped her out somewhere near the harbor, Hawke began to feel anxiety pit in her stomach.</p><p>She folded her arms across her chest. This was stupid. If she walked long enough she’d eventually find her way to somewhere familiar. It wasn’t like anyone was going to successfully jump her here. But it wasn’t right for her mind to have forgotten how to navigate the place she still considered home. It was all very rude, actually. Worst of all, she was going to have to ask someone for directions.</p><p>No, the real worst part of this situation other than her basket completely empty of any croissants, was that Fenris was right.</p><p>Again.</p><p>Hawke’s memory hadn’t failed. Kirkwall had changed. Hightown was mostly empty because even the nobles whose houses didn’t get exploded or burnt down had retreated to their country homes, and Lowtown was always a malleable pile of stones and sticks that got rearranged after each new disaster. The bakery she sought simply didn’t exist anymore. Just as her favorite armorer had left for Starkhaven. Just as Sandal and Bodhan were never coming back.</p><p>Things changed permanently in that they could never go back to what they were, and impermanently in that they would not stay like this forever, either. Rather than trying to force the city back to meet her needs and prop up her vanity, which she might have done three years ago while fighting with every leader it had, the better course of action would be to flow like water around it and hope she didn’t end up hopelessly out to sea.</p><p>She’d just never been any good at that.</p><p>Even the estate as it was now was a fantasy. Half her friends were here, but they’d be gone soon enough, their orbits no longer centered on Hawke. Isabela had her boat, and Merrill had, well, Merrill things, all mysterious and elfy, Bethany had her Alistair, such as he was, and Varric, who wasn’t even here, had his Inquisition. Even Aveline had only stopped by once, and she hadn’t asked Hawke for help with anything at all. She had her position and her husband and her guardsmen.</p><p>Hawke had Fenris, and for some reason, she was doing everything in her power to remedy that.</p><p>In the end, after allowing herself fifteen minutes to pout on someone’s stoop, she found a bakery, a new one, with Orlesian bakers, so she stuffed her basket full of croissants and walked home, tail tucked between her legs. She left the basket in the kitchen, plated the largest almond one, prepared a kettle of tea, and returned to her sleeping Fenris.</p><p>It did not take long for the scent of a still-warm pastry to provoke him awake. Hawke did not count this as <em>her </em>waking him up, because she was content to wait as long as necessary, and it was not her fault her very thoughtful breakfast was so fragrant and appealing.</p><p>Fenris, very rumpled, appeared to agree, in that he was not terribly grumpy on being handed a croissant. Of course, Hawke hadn’t taken into account the very flaky nature of his breakfast, and both of them flicked their eyes to the fireplace before realizing Porthos would not be coming to solve the problem of crumbs in bed. Just another reminder of how right Fenris was on things not going back to how they were.</p><p>She flopped down next to him in utter defeat. “You know, I used to hate this estate.”</p><p>Fenris swallowed while eyeing her. “Used to?”</p><p>“It was Bethany’s dream. And my mother’s. And Bethany never even saw the inside. And I never understood what my mother saw in it. It always felt so… empty. Even when she was still here. I tried to fill it up, but everyone left.”</p><p>Fenris was inscrutable. “It is close to capacity now.”</p><p>“Yes, and that just feels right. Every room of a house should have someone in it doing some activity. Well maybe not<em> every</em> room,” she conceded, “You always need somewhere to escape to, but a majority of rooms, and especially the kitchen. There should always be at least one person in the kitchen cooking or eating or preferably both at the same time. Otherwise it’s just a mausoleum. I know Merrill and Isabela won’t stay forever…”</p><p>But she wished they could. Merrill was already talking about going back to the alienage now that Alistair wasn’t at death’s door, and it was only Isabela keeping her here. And once Isabela’s crew came back—</p><p>Fenris cut into her thoughts. “Perhaps we can convince Varric to move in when he is done with his Inquisition.”</p><p>Hawke popped straight up into a sitting position. “Do you think?” Fenris only grinned at her, all teeth before taking a sip of his tea, and it was a painful three seconds as she accepted it was only a joke. “Don’t get my hopes up like that,” she groaned as she flopped over again. The crumbs danced on the bedspread in response. “A dog,” she declared, “That would really be the finishing touch in this household.”</p><p>“A fluffy one,” he agreed, “To keep our feet warm.”</p><p>She could get a dog, if they decided to stay. The road had been so difficult on old Porthos in the end, but in Kirkwall she could give a dog a cushy life. Veal bones every Sunday, strolls around the De Launcet’s gardens, ratting in Lowtown. A lot of things could be nice, if she decided to stay.</p><p>“Do you think if I said out loud that I wanted to stay in Kirkwall for good, the world would conspire to destroy the city once and for all? A volcano or maybe an earthquake or a whole horde of dragons come from the Bone Pit to melt down the entire place?”</p><p>“With your luck?” Fenris asked, eyebrow raised. But then he turned serious, looking down at her with furrowed brows. “No, I don’t. Is that what you want, Hawke? To stay here? To live in the estate and… fill it? You and me and a full house?”</p><p>He made it sound like they were going to be throwing parties every night. But she could see it. Varric with his own room, half a dozen dogs under everyone’s feet. Maybe Aveline and Donnic would want to stay. It had to be a bit better than their current trek to the keep from Lowtown every day. And it could take months for Alistair to get on his feet again, and Ostwick wasn’t far if he and Bethany wanted to go back. It would be different, but it would be good.</p><p>Fenris was still waiting.</p><p>“Our last mission was a resounding success,” she said slowly, “And I’ve been thinking it might be the perfect opportunity to hang up the old armor and stop running. That is, if Kirkwall still suits you.”</p><p>“It does.”</p><p>Before he could say more, and Hawke could tell he had more to say, there was a crash somewhere, and yelling, and then more muffled sounds.</p><p>“You wanted noise,” Fenris said as Hawke jumped to her feet. She rolled her eyes because <em>this </em>noise didn’t sound at all happy. And she was, sadly, very right.</p><p>Isabela held Bethany with both arms. Hawke couldn’t make out Bethany’s face, pressed to Isabela’s bosom as it was, but Isabela looked stricken.</p><p>“Alistair?” Hawke asked, racing down the stairs three at a time.</p><p>“He’s—”</p><p>Perfectly fine, as far as Hawke could see, panting in his doorway. Sleeping, not dead. About the same as ever.</p><p>“He has some memory loss,” Isabela said. Much quieter, as if mouthing it over Bethany’s head would do much of anything to make it less true or hurtful, she said, “He didn’t recognize Bethany.”</p><p>Hawke slumped, gripping the door frame to prop herself up. Of course. Of course nothing was ever simple or fixed without some unbearable cost. It wasn’t enough that he’d been wounded and tortured and atrophied, no, the demons just had to keep taking.</p><p>Fenris was up now, dressed and standing at the balcony. “I’ll talk to him,” he offered. “I… I know what it’s like.”</p><p>Maker, what a mess. Just as she felt she was getting a little bit of order on some things. No use talking to him now, asleep as he was, so Hawke herded everyone into the kitchen, where her croissants were received with far less delight than she had hoped.</p>
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<a name="section0029"><h2>29. Fenris</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Fenris watched the drink being prepared with a quirked eyebrow. Orana and Merrill were arguing over whether or not to put milk in it. Orana had already dumped about every spice Hawke owned in the mixture, followed by half her herbs, so milk hardly seemed to be the biggest problem here. It could not worsen the taste.</p><p>“Milk will not nullify any of the healing properties of the drink,” Merrill argued, “And he needs the fat.”</p><p>“I’ve never seen it made with milk,” Orana shot back, “If milk were good for it, it would be in the recipe.”</p><p>“I’m more concerned with convincing him to drink it.” Fenris sniffed the concoction. Orana swore it was a Tevinter staple for sore throats, colds, exhaustion, anything really. Fenris supposed with a stopped-up nose, the brew wouldn’t be as pungent.</p><p>“Tell him it’s tea,” Hawke said, sitting on the counter and appearing to enjoy the fight that for once didn’t involve her. “Fereldans will drink anything if you put it in a tea cup and call it tea. Be rude not to.”</p><p>In a rare show of fellowship, he and Merrill caught each other’s eyes at just the same moment.</p><p>Hawke laughed. “Oh, stop scheming, it won’t work on me, I haven’t been Fereldan in a long time. And anyway, then Alistair can choose if he wants milk.”</p><p>This was as suitable a solution as any, and Fenris followed the women to Alistair’s room, where he sat propped up against a dozen pillows looking very uncomfortable.</p><p>“Tea.” Fenris gestured at the kettle Orana left behind. “Milk?”</p><p>“Please,” Alistair responded, his voice sounding like he’d eaten gravel. Honey is what Fenris would have suggested, maybe a lemon, but at that point they might as well put the entirety of Hawke’s pantry in the drink. His pantry. Their pantry. Maybe.</p><p>This wasn’t the time to think about all of that.</p><p>While Fenris poured, Hawke gathered chairs around. He hadn’t realized she intended to stay. He wasn’t certain it was the best idea.</p><p>“Do we… were you with Isabela?” Alistair asked Fenris, brow furrowed at Fenris, “She said she rescued me.”</p><p>“Yes,” Fenris replied. “And we met around six years ago, when this city was on fire. It was brief, and I wouldn’t expect you to remember.”</p><p>“Forgive me, but you don’t have a forgettable face.” Alistair then blinked. “Six years? The Qunari invasion was six years ago?” His eyes traveled between their faces. “Just how hard did I hit my head?”</p><p>“Actually I don’t think you hit your head at all,” Hawke supplied a little too helpfully.</p><p>By Alistair’s expression, that was not a comforting thought. He took a sip of his tea, and if his grimace was anything to go by, he immediately regretted it. Hawke rushed to put a hand on his back as he began to cough and choke, and Fenris grabbed the tea cup before he could spill it.</p><p>“Tea?” Alistair asked, eyes tearing up in the corners.</p><p>“It’s Tevinter,” Fenris explained.</p><p>When he settled, his voice did sound the smallest bit smoother. Perhaps the drink was working. Hawke stayed next to Alistair on the bed, one hand still on his back. Not always the best at comfort, Hawke, but Alistair seemed to appreciate it.</p><p>“I wanted to apologize to Bethany,” he said, “I think… maybe she overheard something that was rude of me. I didn’t mean anything by it, but I called her a rain cloud.”</p><p>Hawke pulled her hand away like Alistair had burned her, and she shot a meaningful look at Fenris that he did not understand. She excused herself and left the room.</p><p>“Should I apologize to her as well?” Alistair asked when she shut the door behind her. “Is rain a sore subject in the Marches?”</p><p>“They are both Fereldan. And no, you have nothing to apologize for.”</p><p>Alistair glared into his “tea.” To Fenris’s shock, he took another sip and coughed again. “What happened to me?” he asked quietly.</p><p>Fenris chose his words carefully. It was not his goal to stir up any memories, particularly the bad ones. “You were on a mission with Hawke for the Inquisition. Your party was trapped in the Fade. You volunteered to stay behind so that the others could escape.” He watched for recognition in Alistair as he spoke, and he saw flickers of it here and there. “Everyone assumed you dead for about two months. But we, that is Hawke, Bethany, Isabela, Merrill, and I, went into the Fade and found you alive and brought you back here.”</p><p>When Fenris lost the first fifteen or so years of his life, there was no one to tell him what happened. His recovery from the ritual that scarred him was not immediate, and neither was his realization of what he was missing in the aftermath. He awoke a blank slate who knew only pain. He did not question his condition or his surroundings. Awareness came slowly.</p><p>Alistair already knew, or at least he suspected. The memories would return, or they wouldn’t. Fenris had no remedy for that. But he knew what it was to reach for a history and find only darkness.</p><p>Everyone assumed that the first feelings on losing time were curiosity or grief. They were wrong. When learning that he was missing his entire personal history, his first feeling was overwhelming fear.</p><p>Alistair had been tortured in ways that even Fenris couldn’t begin to comprehend. Warmth was not Fenris’s strength, but he could be direct. “You have already gathered there are gaps in your memory,” he said, “We do not know the extent of it yet, though the assumption is that they were caused by a demon. But I want to impress upon you that you were cared for in the moments you can’t remember.”</p><p>Alistair only stared at him. Swallowed once. Then he stared at his tea, perhaps considering the risks in finishing it. “Cared for?” he finally asked.  </p><p>“Loved,” Fenris clarified.  “Your men, your friends, the Wardens… even Hawke, in her way. The gaps in your memory may feel like a darkness, something to fear. We do not know each other well, but I do know this about you. You were never alone.”</p><p>Alistair ran a hand through his hair, then pulled it back, stared at it. “Except for in the Fade you mean. Two months did you say? In the physical Fade?” His voice trembled as he spoke.  </p><p>“Even then,” Fenris replied. “We thought that they were just dreams of you. But now we know that even in the Fade, you had company. You were not alone. It is why we came to rescue you at all.”</p><p>Alistair’s knuckles were white around his tea cup. For some reason, a Grey Warden tolerance for pain or unsavoriness, he shot back the rest of his tea and put the cup to the side. Then he shook his head. “I don’t… I don’t remember.”</p><p>“You might. Eventually.”</p><p>It was probably the wrong thing to say. Alistair gave him a wounded look.</p><p>Fenris hadn’t wanted to divulge his own problems—Alistair had enough to deal with—but the knowledge might help. “Hawke used to use a soap on her hair that smelled of… coconuts,” he offered, “It gave me vivid flashbacks. It took some time to realize the cause.”</p><p>“Didn’t you want them? To remember?”</p><p>“Not in the middle of a battle with slavers.”</p><p>Alistair nodded. “Fair enough. I don’t think I’ll be in fighting shape any time soon. Though if you have any coconuts, I’m game to try. Not sure I’ve ever… seen a coconut. Though I guess… I wouldn’t know, would I?”</p><p>The attempt at a joke fell flat, and they both knew it, falling into a strained silence. “Would you like—” Fenris put his hand on the kettle handle, and Alistair winced— “For me to dispose of this in the privy?” he finished.</p><p>“Maker, <em>please</em>.”</p><p>At the door, Fenris hesitated. “If Merrill or Orana ask, tell them you drank all of it. And the milk.”</p><p>Alistair nodded. “What shall I say happened to the kettle?”</p><p>Fenris hadn’t thought of that. He stared at it while Alistair laughed.</p><p>“Fenris.”</p><p>He turned one more time to see Alistair fiddling with the edge of the blanket. “Thank you,” he said. “For more than just that abomination you called tea.”</p><p>Fenris nodded at him and left.</p>
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<a name="section0030"><h2>30. Bethany</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“You should talk to him,” Lea urged her for the sixth time this week—once every morning and evening of each day. “He’s confused and sick and—”</p><p>“He doesn’t know me,” Bethany replied, hugging her knees in her mother’s bedroom, “He doesn’t know that we—It would only upset him.” She couldn’t imagine inflicting this pain on him. It probably wouldn’t hurt as much from the other side, but right now he didn’t know he’d lost something. He had enough injuries without her adding this one.</p><p>“He’ll get to know you. He’ll <em>want</em> to know you.”</p><p>Lea didn’t know that she’d tried. That she approached his door half a dozen times before turning around. It was bitterness, wrapping itself around her bones, tighter and tighter as she inched toward him. And fear, too, that he would look at her like she was nothing. That she would tell him of their history, and he would feel nothing. Or worse, pressured to feel something that wasn’t there anymore. She gave up each time before reaching for the handle, pressed her back to the wall, and listened in on his life, such as it was.</p><p>She’d gotten him back, but it was a different sort of death. He didn’t die, but <em>they </em>died.</p><p>It was a different sort of mourning, and she just wasn’t ready yet. To face it. To start over. Whatever they had now would be new, and she hadn’t been done with the old.</p><p>It would be harder once he was up and about, which would be soon. He sounded stronger by the day, talking with happily Merrill. Bethany was able to sneak to his side while he was sleeping, for a few moments pretending everything was normal, getting her fill of looking at the face she had loved so well, and she stood by the door when he was awake, listening to his jokes go right over Merrill’s head and pushing the back of her hand against her mouth to stop from laughing. Or crying. She was never really sure which.</p><p>She’d deal with it when he was ambulatory.</p><p>“If it were me—” Lea started.</p><p>Bethany snapped. “It’s not you, though, is it? Just keep your nose out of it.”</p><p>“Bethy—”</p><p>“Oh, go marry Fenris and have the thousand babies he wants and leave me alone.”</p><p>“What?” Lea asked, laughter in her voice, “Babies? You think Fenris wants babies?”</p><p>Bethany rolled her eyes. “Even you can’t be <em>that </em>stupid.”</p><p><em>Oh, Maker, </em>she thought as Lea’s face froze on something close to realization, <em>she </em>is <em>that stupid. </em>Bethany’s own face softened as she watched her sister mentally piece together the last months. Uninvited, Lea sat heavily on the bed next to Bethany, and at least it was a change of subject.</p><p>“I wasn’t always asleep, you know,” Bethany said, “When you were talking back in Ostwick. And his voice carries.”</p><p>“I don’t remember him saying <em>anything</em> about babies.”</p><p>“What do you think he meant when he wanted to talk about the future? About marriage? Settling down?”</p><p>Lea covered her face and groaned. “I didn’t think that—marriage doesn’t always include… I just thought he was tired.” She dropped her hand and peeked at Bethany through her fingers. “I did wonder why he insisted on the whole chantry thing. I mean who really cares? They tried to march on me. Seems a bit much to blow up one chantry and then stroll into another and demand a wedding.”</p><p>Bethany almost wanted to put a comforting hand on her idiot sister’s shoulder. Almost.</p><p>Lea sighed. “Did Alistair want…?”</p><p>“We couldn’t,” she replied quickly. It wasn’t even worth talking about, so they never had the conversation. She knew he wanted children. Like she did. No point in hurting each other with it. “If we could, it would have happened by now. Trust me.”</p><p>Lea snorted.</p><p>“That’s not—” Her indignance faded almost as quickly as it arose. She huffed. “I guess that’s exactly what I meant.”</p><p>They both broke into giggles over that, even if Bethany dearly wished she hadn’t said it in her mother’s room. And maybe because it was her mother’s room, or because for a moment there, Lea almost looked <em>shy</em>, ready to bolt if the winds changed, Bethany realized she had to say something else.</p><p>“I’m sorry.”</p><p>All traces of laughter disappeared from Lea’s face. “Oh.”</p><p>“I know I was awful,” Bethany said, deciding against listing every offense, “I know I’ve <em>been </em>awful. I said horrible things to you. And it was unfair.” Lea was fidgeting with her sleeves now, and if Bethany stored knives in her room, she would have given her one to play with. Instead she plunged on with her apology, whether or not she wanted to hear it. “I also know that without you, we never would have made it back. Never. You didn’t even believe me, but you got us to him, and you carried him out when I couldn’t have.”</p><p>“I just didn’t feel like fighting demons anymore,” Lea responded faintly, studiously avoiding Bethany’s eyes.</p><p>And Bethany might have wanted to roll her eyes straight to the void, but demanding that Lea be serious for once while shoving her off the bed did not count as being not-awful, so she held her tongue. “I know it wasn’t just you, but you saved him. And me. And I <em>am </em>sorry.”</p><p>For almost ten years, Bethany had held the Joining as the worst thing that ever happened to her, forced on her by sister. And she had also held that meeting Alistair was the best thing that had happened to her. Both could not actually be true, and if she blamed Lea for one, she should have credited Lea for the other.</p><p>Not that she would ever do that.</p><p>But maybe it was time to accept that all of it—<em>all of it— </em>was an accident of fate, and blaming Lea for everything in the world was… well, something that Lea was just better at anyway to be honest. Best to leave it to her.</p><p>Maker, she’d been an ass. Lea picked at their mother’s quilt and Bethany… didn’t really want the distance between them anymore. It was entirely up to her to solve it this time. “Do you want me to turn your hair white again?” she offered.</p><p>Lea perked up immediately. “With magic? It’s much less smelly when you do it magically.”</p><p>“Yes, with magic. Sit there.”</p><p>Lea sat at their mother’s vanity and watched Bethany in the mirror. She hadn’t run her hands through Lea’s hair like this in years. Her mother had confined them to their room back in Lothering after the first time—brazen use of magic for Lea’s vanity, that had been the phrase she used—but no one in town ever thought much of it. Bethany had only been eleven or so at the time, and Lea had sneaked them both out the window.</p><p>As the strands changed from black to white in her hands, she thought of something else she could do for Lea. “Don’t tell Fenris you didn’t understand what he meant,” Bethany told her.</p><p>“What? Why?”</p><p>“He already thinks you aren’t listening to him. You’re too distracted. Too focused on fixing me. I don’t need to be fixed; I never have.” Lea’s mouth dropped open to say something, but Bethany held up a hand. “Ask him what he really wants in clear terms that even you can understand.”</p><p>“Are we sure those even exist?” Lea joked predictably.</p><p>“And then when he answers,” Bethany said sharply, “Refrain from clever quips.” Lea scoffed, but Bethany was fairly certain she was listening. “Look, for reasons I will never understand, he loves your sense of humor. But this isn’t something to joke about. Don’t you want to spend your life with him?”</p><p>She crossed her arms over her chest. “Of course I do.”</p><p>“There’s no ‘of course’ about it. Not for him. Not when you spend your life chasing after other people.”</p><p>Bethany bit her tongue. It was turning into a lecture again, and that was not what she meant for it. Trust her to procure an olive branch and then just whack her sister with it.</p><p>Lea began drumming her fingers on the wooden vanity. Her hair all white now, but Bethany began to braid it up. “You know I never went in this room, after. Just let it collect dust.” She was very, very quiet when she continued, ‘’All I could think about when I lived here alone was how I was going to be the last Hawke. The last one in this empty, stone house. But then I lost the house, too. What you said in Ostwick was right. I lose people. I can’t help but think that I… that being with me would…”</p><p>Her hair was finished, and Bethany took a step back. “Everyone loses people, Lea. You’re not special.”</p><p>Her eyes widened in the mirror, and Bethany covered her mouth in shock. Maker, it wasn’t an olive branch, it was a bludgeoning. So much for being not-awful. But then Lea laughed—a shocked bubble of mirth that escaped first through her nose and then out the mouth. And Bethany couldn’t help it, staring at Lea’s shaking shoulders and cracked open face, she laughed, too. Too hard, really. Lea doubled almost completely over, tears streaming out the corners of her eyes, clutching her side. And Bethany hadn’t laughed—really laughed—in… Maker, she had no idea. They laughed until the muscles in her abdomen hurt, and she slumped to the floor, back against her mother’s bed, trying to catch her breath.</p><p>Lea gestured in the air. “I shall get it etched over the family crest. Lea Hawke, Champion of Kirkwall, not special.”</p><p>“Shut it,” Bethany got out through giggles.</p><p>“No. It was exactly what I needed to hear.”</p><p>“In that case,” Bethany said, getting ahold of herself, “I have one more thing for you to think about.”</p><p>Lea cocked an eyebrow.</p><p>“Wouldn’t it be nice to have a little Fenris running around the estate?”</p><p>She laughed again, but a lot less convincingly. “Just as likely for it to be a little Hawke. And then where would we be?”</p><p>“You could get lucky. You could get a Bethany.” Lea stood up and offered her hand. Bethany allowed herself to be pulled to her feet. “Or all three. I personally think five is a nice number for you. Hedge your bets and fill up the rooms in this place.”</p><p>The color drained out of Lea’s face to match her newly pale hair. “I should go,” she said slowly.</p><p>Bethany watched her leave. She knew she should feel a little bad for pushing the whole babies thing, but now Lea would be occupied for the foreseeable future, and Bethany <em>did </em>want a niece or nephew to spoil. It was only right to get things moving along. Surely Fenris would be grateful.</p><p>In any event, Bethany could get back to the business of feeling sorry for herself with very little intervention.</p>
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<a name="section0031"><h2>31. Hawke</h2></a>
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    <p>“So,” Hawke started, attempting to exude a confidence she did not possess, “How many children were you thinking of?”</p><p>Fenris did not look up from the armor he was polishing. “Just now? I was not thinking about children at all.”</p><p>“Right.” That made sense. She’d try again later. Much, much later when she wasn’t feeling like such an idiot.</p><p>Fenris grabbed her arm before she could leave, a smile on his lips. “Your hair…”</p><p>“Bethy fixed it.”</p><p>He ran his fingers through it, entirely ruining the braid she had put in. And though Hawke was still very wound up from her own stupidity and misunderstandings, she was happy to let him kiss her. Even better when he wrapped his arms around her and kicked shut the door to their bedroom.</p><p>Except Hawke couldn’t turn her thoughts off this time, and the thought running through her head right now was <em>Oh, Maker, he’s trying to get a start on it. </em>Fenris, ever the observant chap, seemed to intuit her reluctance and pulled away, still smiling. “How many children were you thinking of?”</p><p>Hawke really couldn’t have anticipated the next words that came out of her mouth. “With you?”</p><p>And there went his smile. “Yes, I—who else—”</p><p>“Well I don’t know,” she cut in, eager to move beyond that verbal blunder but still not at all certain what she was about to say next, “People go to alienages and scoop up unwanted children all the time, or so I’m told.”</p><p>If she could have, she would have plucked the words out of the air and swallowed back them back again. And then, while she was at it, she might have swallowed her own foot that was currently lodged in her mouth and the leg attached to it for good measure.</p><p>Fenris was unimpressed. “You want to steal an elven child from the alienage?”</p><p>“No! Maker’s breath, no. That’s monstrous. Can we forget I ever suggested it?”</p><p>He shook his head, but he was almost smiling again when he said, “I do not think I will, no.”</p><p>“And you still want to marry <em>me?</em>”</p><p>Fenris sighed. “Apparently.”</p><p>“You might not be clever as I’ve given you credit for.”</p><p>“Undoubtedly.”</p><p>Hawke began to pace. Pacing was good. Easier to think about her words while she was moving. “Well, back to my first question, because neither of us has actually answered it, just how many babies do you want? Bethany suggested a thousand and then reduced it to five, but I thought I’d get an estimate from you given that <em>I’m </em>the one who has to do the… the…” She couldn’t bring herself to say birthing, because that felt like a cow or a dog or something, and she eventually landed on whispering, “<em>baby stealing</em>.”</p><p>Fenris snorted, which was better than the alternative of him realizing she was an idiot who had disappointed him one too many times. “I’m not putting an order in a store, Hawke. We figure it out together. Without Bethany, preferably.”</p><p>“This is us figuring it out. This here, now.”</p><p>“Alright.” Fenris sat down again and gestured for Hawke to do the same, but she shook her head. This was not a time for sitting.</p><p>“Because what if I can’t?” she asked. “Not everyone… it doesn’t always happen for everyone, does it?”</p><p>“I believe you’ve already proposed stealing as an alternative.”</p><p>“Oh so <em>you</em> get to make clever quips then?” she snapped.  </p><p>“I…”</p><p>He looked hurt and confused and not a single part of this had gone like she’d intended. The only good thing was that Bethany didn’t witness just how quickly her attempt went down in flames. Then again, Bethany might have known how to salvage it, because clearly Hawke was completely unequipped for this conversation.</p><p>“Am I missing something?” Fenris asked.</p><p>“No, no. Not you. I seem to have misplaced my entire brain today.” She ceased her pacing. “Feel free to forget this conversation ever happened,” she said and promptly left the room.</p><p>Maker, that was a disaster. She couldn’t tell Bethany how badly it had gone, and Isabela had already given her all the counsel she was going to. Who else could she bother? Who else wasn’t completely fed up with her nonsense?</p><p>An open door answered her thoughts, and Hawke strolled right in. “Do you ever have days where every single thing you say is the wrong thing? And not just the wrong thing, but the dumbest possible thing you could have said in any given situation?”</p><p>Alistair smiled. “Absolutely.”</p><p>“I knew I could count on you. My dependable little brother, that’s what you’ve always been.”</p><p>Hawke hopped up to the empty side of his bed and laid herself flat on her back next to him.</p><p>“Anything you’d like to share?” Alistair asked, putting his book to the side.</p><p>Hawke patted her pockets. “I don’t think I brought anything with me. Why, are you hungry? I could go scrounge something up.”</p><p>“No, I meant about… you. Your day? Your… dumbest possible things?”</p><p>“Oh. That.” Shame. She sort of missed all those nights around the campfire sampling Orlesian cheeses with him while he waxed poetic about Bethany. “Fenris wants me to have his children and I was too stupid to figure that out.”</p><p>“What were the other options? Someone else had his children?”</p><p>“No, obviously not, hate that idea, but I also wish he’d said something a bit more clear, like, ‘Hello, Hawke. I think we should make small copies of ourselves and unleash them on the world. Also, they will have to burst out of your body, possibly two at a time, but you’re strong, you can handle anything. Have I mentioned recently just how much I enjoy staring at your arse?’”</p><p>Alistair chewed on that for a bit. “I may not have known Fenris for all that long, but I am certain that is a <em>terrible </em>impression of him.”</p><p>“I’ve known him for ten years. It was perfect,” she lied.</p><p>“Of course. Silly me.”</p><p>It wasn’t that she was opposed to children, and if there were any children she’d be interested in, it would be Fenris’s children. Or Bethany’s. Bethany would have sweet little things with chubby cheeks. But Fenris’s scowl on some tiny little face? Absolutely precious. It would be imperative they inherited his eyebrows.</p><p>The truth was that until now, she hadn’t really thought about it. Nothing in their life was suitable to a child. Daggers and demons and slavers and Maker, even the stairs to Lowtown were a death trap. She’d never <em>once </em>seen a baby in the Hanged Man. Wicked Grace was far too complicated for a child to play. Where did they spend their time, anyway? Hawke had spent her childhood covered in mud, and there wasn’t a lot of that in Hightown. Just stones cemented together.</p><p>And what if it was a mage? What if she did get a little Bethany? What would Fenris say to that?</p><p>Alistair broke into her thoughts, and not a moment too soon. “If you do talk to Fenris again, tell him I get what he means about the flashbacks.”</p><p>Hawke sat up straight. “Did you have one?”</p><p>“Earlier. Not exactly. I don’t know. It was… more like a really strong feeling. Very… weird. Couldn’t really explain it. Best forgotten about.”</p><p>He wouldn’t elaborate further, and Hawke had half a mind to simply lock Bethany in the room with him until something shook loose. “Don’t worry,” she sighed, settling in again on his bed. “They get easier, most of the time. Less… emotional. At least, I know Fenris has had an easier time of it.”</p><p>The man looked stricken, and Hawke was certain Bethany was wrong. He knew he lost something, something important, and he felt it even if he didn’t know what it was.</p><p>And it was Hawke’s fault.</p><p> “I’m sorry for leaving you behind.”</p><p>Alistair frowned. “You didn’t leave me behind. I remember that part now. I shoved you. It was awfully brave of me.”</p><p>Hawke’s jaw dropped. She did <em>not </em>spend <em>months </em>feeling guilty about this for him to deny it like that.</p><p>“Didn’t even shove you that hard, really,” he muttered, “You know you really can’t take a hit.” </p><p>“I was once stabbed all the way through here—” she pointed at her abdomen “—and here, simultaneously, didn’t fall over, won the duel, saved the city, and was back on my feet much faster than you’re going. Just how many steps <em>have </em>you taken since you got back?”</p><p>Alistair ignored her question. “And yet against one paltry fear demon—”</p><p>“Paltry? It was the size of a castle—”</p><p>“—You fell over and lost the duel of who gets to be trapped in the Fade, to me, Alistair, who <em>can </em>take a hit, many hits thank you, Champion of the Fade, me, survived the castle-sized demon, and made it out.”</p><p>“I <em>carried </em>you out.”</p><p>“Did you?”</p><p>“Like a sack of groaning and muttering potatoes.”</p><p>They eyed each other, each daring the other to laugh first before they both gave in to it. Oh, it was so rude of him to just flick away her guilt like that, and what did he know, anyway, really, about anything, but it felt good to have Alistair back, giving her grief again.</p><p>“Although,” Alistair said after his laughter had died down, “You do raise a good point.”</p><p>“Did I? That would be a first.”</p><p>“I do resemble a sack of potatoes more than I should like.”</p><p>“It was the only dressing gown we could find long enough for you and I didn’t think fashion would be your first concern.”</p><p>Alistair laughed again. “Not that. I should like to walk somewhere.”</p><p>Now that she could help with. She hopped to her feet. “Where to, Warden Alistair, Champion of the Fade?”</p><p>“I thought I’d start with a raid on the kitchen and see how it went from there.”</p><p>She waited for him to sort himself, legs out of the bedding, feet on the floor, night dress arranged for modesty, and she sat next to him. Before she could get his arm around her shoulder, he called out, “Is someone there?”</p><p>They both looked to the empty doorway, but there was no response. If Hawke was not mistaken, however, the very subtle sound of stockinged feet on a flagstone floor reached her ears. After a moment, Alistair shook his head. “I keep hearing things.” </p><p>“That tends to happen when people creep around houses listening to conversations. Come on, arm over my shoulder. No taking chances now.”</p><p>With a bit more limping than Hawke would have liked, and about twice as slow as Alistair would have liked, they shuffled off to the kitchen.</p><p>“Do you know, I think this nightgown looks very nice on me actually. I’m keeping it.”</p><p>“Trust me, after the way you’ve worn it for the past couple weeks, <em>nobody</em> would take it off your hands.”</p><p>“Because they know they couldn’t do it justice.”</p><p>“Because you stink.”</p><p>“Think I could get Merrill to give me a bath?”</p><p>“I’ll get Fenris to do it. Good practice for his future spawn, though for my sake we better pray they don’t pop out as large as you.”</p><p>Alistair laughed, a little out of breath as they reached their destination, and Hawke settled him on the bench of the kitchen table. But his next words sent her heart straight to her throat.</p><p>“You know I think I’d like being an uncle.”</p><p>Before she could think of how to respond, he blinked his smile away. “Sorry, I’m not exactly sure why I said that.”</p><p>“Because it’s true, you would enjoy being an uncle. And you’d be good at it. If only someone were foolish enough to adopt you as a little brother. Oh, wait.” She nudged his shoulder and smiled at him in a way she hoped was warm and comforting, but the confusion didn’t quite leave his face.</p><p>“You’ll have to remind me how that happened sometime.”</p><p>Hawke swallowed. “I’ll remind you when you can walk to the kitchen alone and fetch your own muffins. Now do you want blueberry or what appears be… walnut?”</p><p>It was banana, and Hawke sat shoulder to shoulder with him as they each ate half of one and then switched. Alistair’s good mood seemed lost, though, and whether it was the confusion or just all the activity, he was starting to slump.</p><p>“Of all the sacks of potatoes in this kitchen,” Hawke said, “I do think you are my favorite.”</p><p>His smile was faint. “That’s good to know, because it’s possible you will need to carry me back to my bed.”</p><p>“Any time, little brother,” she promised. And if she made a little extra noise at the door before leaving so that any eavesdroppers might have the opportunity to scurry away, Alistair did not appear to notice.</p>
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<a name="section0032"><h2>32. Alistair</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Alistair woke up. He’d been doing that a lot. Better than the alternative, but he was finding himself bored of sleeping of all things. Could someone <em>be </em>bored of sleeping? Never seemed to get enough of it in the past. Days spent slogging and fighting and dragging himself everywhere exhausted. Now he felt he’d slept enough for a lifetime.</p><p>Judging by the darkness of the windows and the general hush of the household, it was late. But there, in the firelight, was Bethany Hawke. Not crying this time, just sewing something. He watched her hands work, the repetitive motions threatening to lull him back to sleep. That wouldn’t do. Middle of the night or not, he’d slept <em>enough, </em>and he did not care for where his dreams took him. Wisps of memory or fantasy that he never quite got a grasp on. Or worse.</p><p>Watching Bethany work was much more pleasant. Soothing. Familiar somehow with her bottom lip tucked between her teeth and her pretty face in a bit of scowl. But when she paused to stretch her back, arms in the air, twisting one way, then the other, she spotted him awake.</p><p>“Alistair?”</p><p>Shit. He’d snapped his eyes closed too late. “I, uh, I have to, um…” he trailed off with a look toward the chamber pot. As good a lie as any, he supposed, though why he should lie to her at all he didn’t know. <em>Keep sewing, I’m enjoying the show,</em> just felt like the wrong thing to say.</p><p>“Oh,” she sighed, setting down her work and stretching again, “I’ll help you.”</p><p>Never mind, it was a <em>terrible </em>lie. Alistair blanched. “I can do it myself.”</p><p>She blinked at him sleepily. “Can you? I mean, have you?”</p><p>He had not. Not yet, anyway, though it was the first thing on his agenda, really. Except not tonight at this moment because he didn’t actually have to go, and he <em>really </em>didn’t want to go in front of her.</p><p>“Maybe someone else could help me? Fenris or…” There weren’t any other men in the household that he was aware of. Isabela? Would that be better?</p><p>Bethany rolled her eyes. “I’m not going to wake up Fenris for this. Maker, Ali, it’s not like it’s anything I haven’t seen before.”</p><p>For a split second, all the air around Alistair seemed to wobble and the walls of his room fell away. He had no idea when or where he was. The disorientation was so strong he almost felt dizzy with it, and just as quickly he snapped back to Kirkwall. Bethany was still there, looking nonplussed, and Alistair found himself wondering, had she… seen him before?</p><p>At his overly long silence, Bethany added, “Healing isn’t my specialty, but Wardens make do. I’ve helped a lot of people through their convalescence. This is nothing.”</p><p>So she’d seen other men in this position. That made sense. Possibly even him, in an earlier injury he no longer remembered. Just another Warden duty to her.</p><p>Not that that made him feel <em>any </em>better about any of this.</p><p>He managed to stand up on his own, so really, probably, he didn’t need anyone’s help with relieving himself, which he didn’t actually have to do anyhow. The only relief would be getting out of this situation. Bethany still came to stand near him, and given the wobbliness of it all, it wasn’t a <em>bad </em>idea, but he didn’t need to urinate at the start of this conversation and Bethany standing this close wasn’t exactly spurring his bladder into action.</p><p>So they stood there, next to each other, awkwardly, and Bethany reached for the empty chamber pot to hold it up for him and make it easier, and this as much as anything caused Alistair to break.</p><p>“I don’t actually… I lied.”</p><p>“I can turn around if that will help,” she said with a sigh, “But if you fall over to protect your pride I swear to the Maker—"</p><p>“I really did lie,” he cut in. He sat back down, because she was right, because his legs were almost entirely useless, and he didn’t want her to have to catch him or pick him up off the floor. He could not understand why he was having <em>such </em>a stupid conversation with her. No wonder she avoided speaking to him.</p><p>Oh, he would have liked for her to speak to him.</p><p>“Why would you…?” Her brows furrowed as she looked from him to the chamber pot. “Oh. You wanted me to leave.”</p><p>He didn’t, though. Weird that, how much he really didn’t want her to go anywhere.</p><p>Bethany swallowed and moved to collect her sewing. <em>Stay, </em>he wanted to say, overcome by some mysterious emotion. It was powerful, too powerful for this time of night with a near-stranger, and the closer she got to the door, the stronger it got. “Why do I—” He pressed the palms of his hands to his closed eyes. Nothing for it. “Why do I feel like I miss you?” He heard the sharp inhalation of breath, the two steps she took in his direction, and he dropped his hands. “I don’t want you to leave.”</p><p>Her walk to the bed was the slowest three seconds of his life. She sat down beside him, their knees touching in the dim light, and after a moment took his hand in both of hers. “I miss you, too,” she whispered.</p><p>That hurt. He didn’t know why, but that hurt so much more than it should have until Bethany pressed a kiss to his knuckles.</p><p>“Then don’t go,” he begged her. A tear crept down her cheek, and he wiped it away with a thumb. She turned her dark eyes to his, and Alistair was lost, he was nowhere at all, unless she kept looking at him. How many times? How many times had he held this cheek? “Please stay.”</p><p>“I will.” A promise, a tight swallow, and then their arms were around each other. Maker she was— she smelled like—he needed… He didn’t know. He didn’t <em>know. </em>If he could have held her tighter to himself he would have. He could barely breathe as it was.</p><p>“It’s okay,” she was saying, “Ali, it’s okay.”</p><p>It wasn’t. It really wasn’t. He had never been less okay in his life. She had been there. She had been <em>there</em>. In that place that he never wanted to think of again. It was one thing to joke about it with Hawke—<em>brother, she called me brother—</em>but to remember her there, Bethany, in the rocky endless nothing…</p><p>“They took you. Beth, they took <em>everything</em>.”</p><p>“I know. I know. I’m here.” She held him, and she didn’t disappear or fade. She stayed, her hands soothing circles on his back, her voice in his ear. Eventually he got his breath back. Eventually he released her long enough for her to get under the covers of his bed and pull him there with her.</p><p>He didn’t want to sleep. He didn’t want to sleep ever again. Even blinking risked her being lost to him. These feelings that he didn’t understand but didn’t want to lose. If he closed his eyes, he could be back, immobilized, alone.</p><p>“I’m here,” Bethany promised, over and over again, “I’m not going anywhere.”</p><p>Alistair woke up in Bethany’s arms.</p><p>It was all still a mystery, how he got here, like a book filled with blank pages. A book covered in spikes with the words “Poison, don’t read” written on the spine. Locked in a chest. In the bottom of the ocean.</p><p>But he knew her. He <em>knew </em>her. He knew the smell of her neck and the feel of her hair between his fingers. He knew her voice, her heartbeat, the blush in her cheeks. She was real, and she was here, and he was wrapped up in her.</p><p>However he got here, Alistair woke up in Bethany’s arms and he was home.</p>
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<a name="section0033"><h2>33. Fenris</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Fenris woke up to the aftermath of a hurricane in their bedroom. Or at least, that is what he had to assume happened. Every article of clothing they owned was thrown on the floor, every drawer emptied, every surface cleared off. It was a wonder the noise hadn’t woken him earlier. A stealthy hurricane, then, whose name was undoubtedly Hawke.</p><p>She sat at her writing desk, head in one hand, and as he blinked her into focus, he saw the shuddering of her shoulders. Weeping. Silently.</p><p>He propped himself up on his elbows. “Hawke?”</p><p>Rare enough to see her cry, even rarer for her to do so openly. Where he expected her to try to hide her face and pretend none of this was happening, a silly lie on the tip of her tongue, she instead turned her bleary, red eyes to him and said simply, “I lost it.”</p><p>He nodded. “I can see that.” He ran a hand through his hair. “What did you lose?”</p><p>“The ring.”</p><p>Ah. He supposed he should have felt something. Perhaps if it were not so early in the morning. Or if she had ever worn it. Or wanted it. Hard to lament a ring she did not like that had not served his purpose.</p><p>And yet, Hawke was, for some reason.</p><p>“Come here.”</p><p>She didn’t look at him as she crawled into bed next to him, and he had to pull her the rest of the way when she avoided touching him at all. “You never wore it,” he said.</p><p>“I know. But…we’re back in Kirkwall, in our bed, our home, and you said you wanted to stay, and Alistair is back, and he’s better, sort of, and… Bethany’s right and Isabela, too, and I wanted to… I could… I could actually see it for once. And it didn’t feel hard to just walk over together and get married and figure it out from there.”</p><p>Fenris listened to her babbling with guilt pitting in his stomach, and when she was done, he pressed his lips to the top of Hawke’s head and said, “No.”  </p><p>If there was something worse than Hawke telling him she didn’t want to marry him, it was whatever this was. Marriage, or a proposal of marriage, when done correctly, should have increased her confidence in their relationship. In him.</p><p>His had had the opposite effect entirely.</p><p>He’d spent a lot of time thinking about it since that night in Ostwick. In the end, he’d come to the uncomfortable conclusion that a large portion of the blame rested on his shoulders.</p><p>Hawke swallowed. “No?”</p><p>“No,” he repeated, “We’re not getting married today. Or this week. It’s a bad idea.”</p><p>“Oh.”</p><p>“But not for whatever reason you are currently telling yourself. I don’t care about the ring. It was just a thing. You never wore it, not once, because it did not fit you, because I purchased it alone in a city I hate. If that were not a bad enough start, I proposed to you after you had only just returned from a nightmare realm where you thought you left your brother-in-law to die.” He paused to gauge her reaction. Fewer sniffles, but her eyes looked lost and unfocused. He gave her a squeeze. “And I don’t know how I missed this, but I should have known better than to propose to you in <em>Orlais.</em>”</p><p>“I didn’t even think of that,” she said, utter dismay painted across her face. “That’s terrible bad luck. I don’t know how I missed that.”</p><p>“I do. You were thinking of grief and regret, of your sister, whose life was about to change forever with the news you bore, and instead of helping you with that burden, I added to it.”</p><p>Even his proposal had been dripping in guilt. <em>Don’t leave me behind</em>.  As if he hadn’t agreed to be left. As if his choice to follow her for years was somehow her fault.</p><p>“It was a regrettable proposal,” he stated. He pushed a piece of hair out of her face, and couldn’t help adding, “Beside which, Hawke, you seem to have forgotten that there is no chantry in Kirkwall anymore. There is nowhere for use to walk to.”</p><p>Another misjudgment. He thought she might laugh, but instead she squeezed her eyes shut. Her voice was shaky when she said, “Why is this so hard?”</p><p>“I don’t know.”</p><p>“I feel like if I say one more stupid thing, you’ll realize I’m… I’m just not enough. I can’t be enough anymore.”</p><p>“Hawke.” He shifted her in his arms, pushed more hair from her face as she refused to look at him. “You are so many things, but you could never be not enough. Besides,” he added, “If I walked away the first time you said something stupid, I would not have known you more than one evening.” Kaffas, that came out too harsh, but he felt her give the slightest little tremble. It might have been a laugh. “And if I walked away the first time you couldn’t give me what I wanted when I wanted it, I would not be able to face myself. I would not be worthy of you.”</p><p>She sniffed. “It can’t be the first time.”</p><p>“The second time, then.” That was a real laugh from her this time, even if she ended it with a sniffle. Fenris pushed on. “For too long, my life has been a reaction to circumstances. Running before I met you, then waiting, then running again. I don’t want to spend my life reacting to the hate and fear of others. I want to choose the center of my life, and I want it to be… love.” Fenris swallowed.  “Family. I want you to be that family.”</p><p>“What if I can’t give that to you? Trouble always finds me.”</p><p>“The attempt will be worth it.”</p><p>Finally, finally she turned her brown eyes to his, doubtful in the face of his certainty. “Even if it all falls apart again?” she whispered.</p><p>“Yes.”</p><p>Hawke swallowed, but she did not look away. Her lips parted, always one more doubt, one last word to get in, but then she closed them again and nodded.</p><p>Someday, Hawke would take their weapons off the rack in the foyer, give them a thorough dusting, and mount them on some wall in the estate in a place of pride. Whenever that was, a month from now or years, if she hadn’t done it herself already, Fenris would propose again.</p><p>For now, all that was left was to help her clean up their room, just as soon as he stopped kissing her.</p>
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<a name="section0034"><h2>34. Bethany</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Lea’s garden was terribly overgrown. Bethany hardly knew what to look at first—whether it was the vines crawling over everything and threatening to choke her one tree, the bushes that had seemingly never known a trimmer, or the ground covered in weeds and flowers in equal measure. If there was an order to the planting of anything, if at one time the tulips had been there and the irises had been over there, if she really meant to be growing onions here or if someone had just been uncareful with their refuse, it would take an archaeologist to puzzle it all out. More likely, Lea had just scattered seeds to see what would happen.</p><p>What happened was chaos.</p><p>And Alistair was happily seated in the center of it, an open journal on his knees. How he even spotted the stone bench Bethany didn’t know. Every farmgirl instinct she had was telling her to take a hoe to this place and whack it into submission, but Alistair said the buzzing of the bees relaxed him, so she only set to work on the worst of it.</p><p>“Your favorite color?” he asked as Bethany hacked at the vines.</p><p>That was an easy one. “Blue. Periwinkle to be exact.”</p><p>Alistair wrote it down. “And what color is periwinkle exactly?”</p><p>Bethany laughed. “I’ll point it out if I see any.”</p><p>“Right. What about… favorite dance?”</p><p>“I’m rubbish at dancing, so anything where only the men have a go.”</p><p>“I suppose… Warden life doesn’t afford many opportunities for dancing anyway.”</p><p>“With all the drinking we do? I almost learned to play the fiddle just so <em>someone</em> would stop pulling me onto the floor. Luckily, I have a partner who doesn’t mind when I step on his feet, drinking or no.”</p><p>Alistair grinned. “They are awfully big feet. Next we have favorite… fruit?”   </p><p>Turning the page, he managed to knock his cane from its resting place by his legs onto the ground. Lea had gotten it made special for him, extra tall and with a hawk carved into the handle just in case they ever forgot who gave it to him. He’d been glad for the help, and eager to get out of doors, but Hightown wasn’t exactly the friendliest place for the weary.</p><p>“Your ancestral home just had to have this many stairs, did it?” he asked her with a smile, but she could see the strain. “No wonder you have such beautiful calves.”</p><p>“I think that’s from spending so much time running around underground with you,” she retorted. His smile completely fell away at that, and whether he was thinking about the past he couldn’t remember or how he was ever going to hold a shield again, Bethany couldn’t say. They returned home soon after.</p><p>Hot baths, cool magic, elfroot tea every morning, but his joints bothered him. They seemed to take turns aching, ankles one day, hips the next. The cane was helping, but Alistair wasn’t a man completely without pride. He had always relied on his own physical strength, counted on it, taken it for granted, and now it was gone. There was a hesitation before he picked up the cane, a chagrin to how he leaned on it.</p><p>She had found him looking in the mirror, tugging on his shirt and glaring at the way it hung off him. He caught her eye with a wince. “At least I still have my hair,” he joked.</p><p>“If you returned to me without a single hair on your head, I would have simply knitted you a hat,” she replied, pulling him forward to kiss him soundly.</p><p>None of that mattered to her so long as he was alive, but of course it mattered to him.</p><p>Now, in the garden, while picking up his cane and sitting next to him, she replied, “I like pears. The entire garrison used to groan when the yearly shipment arrived. Can’t keep them fresh, even with magic, and almost everyone glared daggers at you while eating them for the fifteenth meal in a row.”</p><p>“I don’t even like pears,” Alistair muttered.</p><p>“I know. You prefer peaches. And your suffering was very romantic.” She kissed him on the nose, but he shut the journal with a snap, his knuckles going white with it. They could only play this for so long before Alistair’s memories took him somewhere he didn’t want to be, or, like today, the blankness of their past chipped away at his mood.</p><p>Bethany wrapped his arm around her shoulder. He felt how he felt about her, grumpy and dispirited or no. He just didn’t remember how he got there—how <em>they </em>got there. But they would make new memories together, better ones, because they had time.</p><p>And because Bethany had already decided they were never returning to the Wardens. If Alistair ever healed completely, and there were no promises that he would, he deserved a softer life. He’d given enough—duty, sacrifice, vigilance, all of it. The Wardens would get his death in the end, and hers, but the rest of their lives were theirs. She would make sure of it.</p><p>For now, she made a mental note to find out when the earliest peaches were in season and slid the journal out of his hand to place it to the side.</p><p>“My turn. If you could go anywhere, where would you want to go?”</p><p>He shrugged, a pained expression on his face. “How would I know? Can’t remember where I’ve been.”</p><p>His knee bounced rhythmically as he stared forlornly at the single embrium growing in the yard.</p><p>So he was planning on nursing this bad mood, then.</p><p>Bethany swallowed a smile. It was unfair, truly, that she had all their memories and thus knew she would out-stubborn him into a good mood in the end. He didn’t have a chance, and he didn’t yet know the battle was lost.</p><p>“Countryside or city then?” she asked.</p><p>He frowned, but his answer was quick enough. “City.”</p><p>“Warm or cold?”</p><p>He shrugged again. “A little of both? Get tired of one and then it’s time for the other. Or…” He flexed his ankles with a grimace. “Warm, maybe. Yeah.”</p><p>“I think that rules out most of Ferelden. And the North is out; you can’t handle the spicy food.”</p><p>“I can handle it,” he muttered, “Can handle anything.”</p><p>Well, that was a lie, but she’d let him have it.</p><p>For about three seconds.</p><p>“Ali,” she said gently, carefully picking her words, “After everything, it’s reasonable for you to be… resentful. Bitter. No one would blame you for it.”</p><p>He raised an eyebrow. “Why am I sensing there is a ‘but’ dangling at the end of your sentence?”</p><p>“Because you aren’t half as stupid as you like to pretend you are,” she answered honestly. That earned her a huff. “<em>But</em>… truth be told, you’re not very good at it. Bitterness or resenting. You’re sort of bad at it actually.”</p><p>Alistair rolled his eyes, but with a bit of a crooked smile attached, and Bethany nodded. “Like that. That was hardly sour enough for this occasion at all. Here, watch me.”</p><p>Keeping her face completely drawn, Bethany dramatically rolled her eyes, her mouth falling open in disgust, a tiny puff of air escaping her at the end of it in a perfect show of disdain. When she turned back to Alistair, he was almost grinning.  </p><p>“That <em>was </em>really good. I felt it. In my gut. The judgement, the… scorn.”</p><p>Bethany nodded. “So you see, you should probably leave it to the experts.”</p><p>“I <em>could </em>be bitter,” he muttered.</p><p>Bethany carefully placed a hand on his cheek and brought his face to hers so she could give him a slow, deep kiss. On pulling away she said, “Not bitter at all, I’m afraid.”</p><p>He took a deep breath, but his bad mood had settled more deeply into his chest than Bethany had realized.</p><p>“I’m not going to pretend it’s not different now. It is. Maybe…” she hesitated on the words that neither of them had been saying the past week. It was still too early to know, but Bethany couldn’t help but think practically about these things.  “Maybe forever. Maybe you always need a cane, or you never remember my twenty-sixth birthday for as long as you live. And if you want to take lessons from Fenris and learn what true bitterness is, I won’t stop you.”</p><p>Alistair swallowed, and Bethany felt her own tears prickling in her eyes. Flames.  “But?” he asked.</p><p>“No ‘but.’ I just… I’m so happy to have you back, and I wish you could feel a tenth as happy as I do about it. I feel selfish for hoarding it all. That’s all.”</p><p>He pressed his forehead to hers, and they breathed together, slowly. “I don’t mind giving it all to you,” he said.</p><p>“Yeah, but we’re really good at sharing. We’re a team like that.”</p><p>Bethany wrapped her arms around him as she had done one hundred, two hundred times since he first recognized her again. And yes, he felt different under her hands, less of him now, but none of it mattered. None of it mattered at all because after a moment he asked, “But now I have to know. How <em>did </em>we spend your twenty-sixth birthday?”</p><p>Bethany laughed into his shoulder. “I can’t believe I’m about to say this, but I don’t actually remember. I want to say… darkspawn?” It was always darkspawn, honestly. He should just write that down in his little journal next to all her favorite things. She popped her head up. “But I <em>did</em> just remember—” Her hand crept across his belt and into his far pocket, Alistair raising an eyebrow at her all the while. She pulled out his handkerchief and held it up. “Periwinkle.”</p><p>And at that, Alistair finally laughed. Vanquished entirely.  “Alright, help me up,” he said, getting his feet under him.</p><p>“Why? Where are we going?”</p><p>Alistair accepted his cane from her and held out his arm for her to take.  “I’m going to go see Fenris about those bitterness lessons you mentioned. Clearly I need some practice.”</p><p>She squeezed his arm. “I asked for this, didn’t I? Fine. I’ll make the tea.”</p><p>Any lessons wouldn’t take, she knew, and that suited her just fine.</p>
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<a name="section0035"><h2>35. Fenris</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“I might have done something,” Hawke said before Fenris had even stepped all the way into the foyer. “I got you something. Well, sort of. I mean I did, but I probably should have asked first. We did talk about it, and you seemed amenable to the whole thing, so I’m pretty certain you’ll approve, but, Maker, I should have asked—” She was interrupted in her rambling by a small cry behind the door, and Fenris felt his heart in his throat.</p><p>“You didn’t, Hawke. Please tell me you didn’t steal a baby.”</p><p>Her face fell, and for a moment that was the only confirmation Fenris needed. But then she huffed.</p><p>“For Andraste’s sake, <em>no</em>. I got you a puppy.” She opened the door slowly. “Two of them, actually. His and hers. They’re not mabari, because I’m not going off to war anymore, so I don’t need a war dog who can play poker, but…”</p><p>Fenris wasn’t listening. He was already on the floor, two, small, fluffy creatures licking his face while whining the entire time. They were mostly black, with white and brown about the face, all tongues just at this moment. Hawke joined him on the floor and prized one away from him.</p><p>“I don’t know a<em> lot </em>about babies, but I know they don’t sound like puppies,” she muttered before shoving her entire face into his fur.</p><p>Fenris’s puppy had already worn herself out and was now fighting sleep, her little eyes falling closed without her permission as she fought them open again and again. She threatened to topple over entirely. “You’re all fluff, aren’t you?” he murmured as he tucked her against his arm and stroked her little, round belly. She was no match for that comfort, and in moments she lost her battle to slumber.</p><p>“Have you already named them?” he asked.</p><p>Hawke’s pup was biting the lace of her boot while she slowly dragged her foot around for him. She shook her head. “I was thinking of naming mine Varric.”</p><p>Fenris grinned. Of course she was.</p><p>“You don’t object?” she asked.</p><p>“On the contrary. I encourage it.”</p><p>Hawke narrowed her eyes as her puppy hurled himself at her foot and rolled into a somersault. “Why do I get the feeling you have ulterior motives for encouraging me?”</p><p>His own pup gave a big sigh in his arms, already suffering large thoughts too big for her little head. He agreed with her. “I assumed, if we ever had a child, you would want to name him Varric. A child and a dog cannot share the same name in the same family. It would be confusing.”</p><p>Hawke thought about this only for a moment before blurting out, “Donnen. His name will be Donnen.”</p><p>Fenris appraised little Donnen, who did not seem nearly as weary or weathered as his namesake, though perhaps he shared his tenacity, given how thoroughly he wanted to pounce on Hawke’s boot. In any event, anything was better than Varric. Donnen would have time to grow into his new name.</p><p>More importantly, though they had not discussed it again, it was good to know Hawke was not opposed to the idea of future children. Not if she was saving names for them.</p><p>Fenris grinned again. “Then I shall have to name mine Varric.”</p><p>“You wouldn’t,” she hissed.</p><p>“No, I wouldn’t,” he agreed, “Because I’m going to name her Apricot.”</p><p>Years ago in the market he had been eating apricots and decided with great reflection that it would make a good name for a dog should the opportunity arise. He liked apricots. Almost as much as he liked dogs.</p><p>“Apricot?”</p><p>“It’s a good name, Hawke.”</p><p>She smiled before kissing him on the nose. “So it is.”</p><p>Donnen settled now, having come to terms with Hawke’s boot and curling around it, but she picked him up to cradle him in her arms instead.</p><p>“They’ll be too big to do this one day,” she sighed.</p><p>“You’ll still try, though.”</p><p>So would he. He was still grinning. He’d be smiling well into the night, if he slept. Two puppies. Apricot cried a little in her sleep, kicking her feet, and Fenris tickled her chin until she huffed another big sigh. Hawke leaned her head against his shoulder, and the two of them sat on the floor of the foyer, cradling the little, warm balls of fluff.</p><p>“I <em>am</em> sorry for not asking,” she said, “I don’t know what I was thinking.”</p><p>“Hawke, I’ve seen you around puppies. You were not thinking at all. But it is a happy surprise.” He glanced at her sideways as she laughed. He could only hope she’d actually paid for them and not stolen them outright without even noticing.</p><p>“I think Apricot is going to need a bright yellow bow around her neck to suit her sunny name,” she said, “Maybe a little bell on it so we can hear her coming.”</p><p>“And Donnen?”</p><p>She hummed. “I don’t think strapping a sword to a dog makes a lot of sense—maybe we can steal Aveline’s captain’s badge and fasten that around his neck.”</p><p>“Perfect. He shall soon be solving the mystery of ‘who stole dinner off the table.’”</p><p>“And the sequel, ’Who ate mum’s favorite pair of boots?’”</p><p>“With the thrilling final volume to the trilogy, ‘Who left that mess on floor?’”</p><p>“Oh, I hope Donnen goes easy on Apricot. She was framed, I know it.”</p><p>Fenris nodded seriously. “I’m sure we’ll find in the end it was all the work of some dastardly other dog, because ours would never do such terrible things. No they wouldn’t,” he added with another scritch to Apricot’s chin.  </p><p>“About that—” Hawke started, but Fenris was distracted by another small cry behind the closed door to the foyer.</p><p>“What was that?”</p><p>“You mean the baby I stole and am currently neglecting while we play with puppies?” she replied, batting her lashes at him.</p><p>Fenris waited.</p><p>“That would probably be Alistair and Bethany with their own two puppies.”</p><p>“<em>Four </em>puppies?”</p><p>“Alistair named his ‘Griffin.’ And Bethany’s is ‘Marian’ for some reason. She said she always liked the name.”</p><p>“Four puppies,” he said again, laughing a little to himself.</p><p>“The whole litter,” she said nervously while Fenris laughed harder. She really hadn’t been thinking. She saw a litter of fluffy dogs and took the entire bunch home, head empty and arms overly full. Ridiculous.</p><p>He loved her so much.</p><p>“Alistair has already sent out to find someone to paint their portrait,” Hawke offered. “I’m not sure if the rest of us are meant to be in it.”</p><p>Fenris nodded, getting to his feet without jostling Apricot too much. He had to see these other dogs. “Then we better get Apricot her yellow bow very soon. We want her looking her best.”</p><p>A big one. Shiny. So she’d stand out in the crowd.</p><p>He shook his head again. <em>Four puppies. </em>He hesitated at the door. “You didn’t get one for Merrill or Isabela, did you?”</p><p>“No. Maker, do you think they would have wanted them? There were only four and Merrill’s never really shown an interest—”</p><p>“No, I just wanted to make sure that there are <em>only </em>four puppies.”</p><p>“Four puppies and nary a stolen child to be seen.”</p><p>Fenris set Apricot on the floor to free his hands so he could put them on Hawke’s waist. “You keep my life interesting, Hawke.”</p><p>“In a good way?” she asked, her crooked smile indicating she already knew the answer.</p><p>“Always.”</p><p>Hawke kissed him, delicately leaning over her furry—and now writhing—bundle. The kiss was cut short fairly quickly with a left hook from Donnen.</p><p>“Al<em>right,</em>” Hawke said to the pup as she pulled away, “Your complaint has been lodged, but you really are going to have to get used to me doing that.” She set him back on the floor, where Apricot immediately pounced on him. “I intend to do it a lot.”</p><p>“Do you?”</p><p>She kissed him again, long and slow. “As often as you want.”</p><p>He leaned in to kiss her again, but his eyes caught Donnen lifting a pudgy little fluffy leg, and he dodged around her to grab him.</p><p>Kissing could wait until <em>after </em>the four puppies were housetrained.</p>
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<a name="section0036"><h2>36. Alistair</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Alistair spent every morning working in the courtyard garden of the Hawke estate. He’d never learned to tend the land at all, and Bethany had to teach him simple things like weeding at the start.</p><p>“How do I know which one is a weed?” he’d asked her as she coaxed the roots out of the dirt to show him the proper technique.</p><p>“Anything we don’t want here is a weed.”</p><p>“How do I know which one of these is something I want?” he’d asked of the small green shoots. They all looked different from each other, but he had no idea what they would eventually be.</p><p>“Anything that has a leaf like this—” she said, holding out the ill-fated plant “—get rid of it or it will take over the entire garden. Anything else we can figure out later.”</p><p>That had been weeks ago, when Alistair still got tired after removing three weeds.</p><p>It was vibrant here. He liked the humming of the bees, the muffled sounds of people on the street, the birds. It was green here, but not at all like that other place. The garden was green with life, and Alistair only truly felt calm when he was surrounded by it, hands in the dirt, Griffin flopping over on his feet and grumbling when he moved.</p><p>“You’ve got a parcel,” Bethany announced as Marian pounced on her brother.</p><p>“Not on the embrium,” Alistair groaned, picking them each up and dumping them onto the flag stones. Maker, they got heavy fast. He sat down on the stone bench to receive his bizarrely shaped envelope. A small vial fell out when he opened it, and he set it to the side to read the letter within.</p><p>
  <em>Dear Alistair, </em>
</p><p>
  <em>I’ve only just returned to the surface to find the sky was torn open but now seems to be on the mend, demons everywhere, and a series of letters from or about you, first asking me for help, then telling me Clarel was crazy, then a letter from Clarel demanding I help her and also possibly capture or kill you, then that you were dead, that Bethany had abandoned her post in her grief, and finally that happily, you were alive, if not well, and asking for my help again. I don’t know how you managed it, but you seemed to have had a much more dramatic year than I did. Well done. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>I hope this gift will lead you will forgive me for my uselessness. There is enough there for both you and Bethany. Goes down about as well as the Joining, but the results are far less lethal. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>Have a good life, my friend. You have earned it. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>D</em>
</p><p>Alistair snatched the strange vial and examined it. “Beth. Beth, come over here.”</p><p>She left the dogs to their devices, embrium be damned, and sat down next to him, concern across her face. He passed her the letter.</p><p>“Do we have anything planned for this afternoon?” he asked as she scanned it.</p><p>She shook her head. Taking her hand with one of his and popping the cork with the other, Alistair smiled. “You go first, love,” he said.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Yeah I decided on the most self indulgent ending possible don't @ me</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0037"><h2>37. Hawke</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>one more conversation about stealing babies, I'm sorry.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“I have two pieces of news.”</p><p>Fenris rolled himself into a sitting position from the floor, and Donnen and Apricot followed suit. Now that she had them all at attention, Hawke brandished a letter.</p><p>“Varric is coming home.”</p><p>Saying the words out loud, she let the smile spread across her face. It would stick there, if she let it, permanent and almost painful as it reached the limits for how big a smile could go. Both the dogs started thumping their tails, though they could hardly know why, but Fenris scrambled to his feet with his own broad grin.</p><p>“Did the Merchant’s Guild finally catch up with him?”</p><p>Hawke shook her head. “It’s worse, he’s been made Viscount, completely against his will. Says he only accepted it since I’m here, but I know better. He’s already running things in Hightown, because along with this letter was a deed to one of the empty estates for Bethany and Alistair.”</p><p>She flomped down on their sofa, pleased when Fenris followed her. A little less happy when Donnen took the opportunity to jump on her lap where he did not fit whatsoever. She gently shoved him back to the floor despite his wounded huffing.</p><p>“Their own estate?” Fenris asked, “Did you ask if—”</p><p>“If it has a garden?” she finished with him. “I checked. It does, larger than ours even, though entirely untended to. Weeds and dead vines everywhere. He’ll have to spend hours and hours getting it how he wants it. Years maybe.”</p><p>Fenris settled further into the sofa with a small wiggle of his shoulders, and Hawke didn’t need more invitation than that to drape herself across him. All of the excitement that had been bursting through her skin now drained away into a pleasant laziness. Everything was going to change again, but for the better this time.</p><p>Varric was coming home, no worse for wear, and it felt like… like lighting a lamp in the last locked room of her heart. All warm and bright now, maybe covered in a bit more dust than she’d like, but open, and bigger than she’d remembered.</p><p>“We should buy them a tree,” Fenris suggested, his fingers running through her hair.</p><p>“A tree?”</p><p>“For their garden. One that flowers in the spring, gives shade in the summer. One that will last.”</p><p>She buried her face in his neck. “That is the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard.”</p><p>“Would you like a tree, Hawke?”</p><p>She could hear the smile in his voice. “No,” she replied, her fingers tugging on his waist, holding him just a little closer, “I have everything I need.”</p><p>Including a dog who had planted her head on Fenris’s lap and was drooling on them both and another who was chewing on something he really shouldn’t be, but Hawke wanted to hold onto this moment, this feeling, with both hands for as long as she could.</p><p>“You’re going to miss them,” Fenris murmured after a time.  </p><p>It was true, if selfish of her. She had imagined Bethany would stay forever this time, had hoped she could convince her to want to.</p><p>“They won’t be going far. And—” she dragged herself up to face him, a crooked smile on her lips “—there is the second piece of news. It might get a bit crowded here with them.”</p><p>Fenris raised an eyebrow.</p><p>“Apparently Bethany and Alistair have been up to… well, whatever it is ex-Wardens get up to. Bethany is going to have a baby and they need the room because I think she’ll try to have four more as soon as possible. Are you ready to be an uncle?”</p><p>He was ready to be more than that even if both of his eyebrows climbed so high up his forehead they were entirely hidden by shaggy hair, but that was a discussion for a later time. For once, Hawke’s family was growing, not shrinking, and she hardly knew how to feel about that.</p><p>Good, she supposed. She was meant to feel good.</p><p>And she did. Probably. Mostly.</p><p>Still, there was that niggling worry somewhere about the spine. Babies didn’t always arrive easily or simply and never without blood. And as if sensing it, Fenris moved his hands up and down her back, smoothing that worry out and dulling the sharp edges of her fear.</p><p>“Soon the Hawkes will outnumber everyone in Hightown,” Fenris said.</p><p>Impossible, and untrue. The Bryas had at least six children wreaking havoc at all times.</p><p>Though wouldn’t that be a change for the city—elf- and mage-sympathizers, half-elves and apostates, taking up every mansion and filling the Viscount’s docket. How would Kirkwall look after a few years of that? She could just imagine her parents’ shock and delight at how their progeny ruined the city by making it better. She could almost hear them laughing.</p><p>“Maybe she shouldn’t stop at just five,” Hawke wondered aloud.</p><p>“By all means, tell her that.”</p><p>She shoved him, just a little, and he pulled her back against his chest, where she could better hear the rumblings of his laughter. “Maybe she’ll do it all at once,” she said into his shirt, “Octuplets. They’d both be so tired that no one would even notice… if I just happened to—”</p><p>“Don’t say it,” he groaned.</p><p>“—Steal one or two.”</p><p> Her laughter was cut short by Fenris flipping her onto her back and pinning her there, couch cushion tumbling over them both and onto the floor.</p><p>“You never know,” she pressed, ignoring her prone and defenseless position, “Eight at once, they might be glad if I took a couple off their hands.”  </p><p>He silenced her by kissing her, but he broke it after only a moment, a huff of laughter buried in her collar. “You have only just repaired your relationship with Bethany,” he admonished her lightly.  </p><p>“So I shouldn’t joke about stealing babies in front of my pregnant sister?”</p><p>“No.”</p><p>“I probably shouldn’t joke about that in front of anybody,” she suggested.  </p><p>He shook his head, his shaggy hair brushing her face. “No.”</p><p>“Do you think Varric would find it funny?”</p><p>Fenris closed his eyes and grimaced. With a sigh he admitted, “Yes.”</p><p>Hawke laughed. She laughed, and she kissed Fenris, and she laughed some more. She shrieked when a dog licked her ear, and cackled when Fenris fell off the sofa, threw a pillow at the intruder who walked in to see what the fuss was about, but it was only Alistair who caught the thing anyway, but mostly she laughed. Varric was coming home, and she was going to be an aunt, and maybe things were going to be okay for a little while.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>I'm not that sorry.</p>
        </blockquote><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Find me on tumblr as nug-juggler!</p><p>There is a companion fic to this one-- more Warden adventures for Alistair and Bethany that did not fit into the fic. https://archiveofourown.org/works/28751970/chapters/70501449</p></blockquote></div></div>
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